SOURCE: Taylor, Henry. “May Sarton: Home to a Place Beyond Exile.” In Compulsory Figures: Essays on Recent American Poets, pp. 190-206. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992.

In the following essay, Taylor asserts that the poetry of Sarton's Collected Poems is organized to illustrate not only her poetic development, but her maturation as a person.

I

The retrospective exhibition of a poetic career may be either highly selective or generously inclusive; the choice the author makes between these two approaches has much to do with the poet's temperament. The highly selective poet, whose definitive collection contains, say, less than half of her published work, is likely to think of poetry as the production of separate finished pieces. The author of the more inclusive collection, on the other hand, is more forgiving of failure and false moves, on the grounds that poetry, as a way of perceiving and knowing...