May Sarton Way Quotations

Routine is not a prison, but the way to freedom from time.

It feels a long way up and down from zero.

Poetry has a way of teaching one what one needs to know ... if one is honest.

For me a true poem is on the way when I begin to be haunted, when it seems as if I were being asked an inescapable question by an angel with whom I must wrestle to get at the answer.

I cannot understand why poetry is not taught at schools as a way of seeing, a quick, untiring path to essentials.

poetry is first of all a way of life and only secondarily a way of writing.

over and over again I am struck by the wordiness of modern poetry, as if language had replaced experience and must be more and more extreme, intricate and in a way divorced from life itself. It seems as if what we all need is a great purification - but how will that come about?