As part of Women’s History Month, we are featuring the poet, novelist, and memoirist May Sarton.
May Sarton was born Eleanore Marie Sarton in Belgium in 1912. Her parents were George Sarton, a science historian, and Eleanor Mabel Elwes, an artist. Her family fled the country at the beginning of WWI, and after a few years of moving around, May’s father accepted a position at Harvard University. The family settled in Cambridge initially on Channing Place and later moved to 103 Raymond Street. May attended Shady Hill School where she began writing poetry. When her family moved back to Belgium for a few years, May attended the Institute Belge de Culture Française in Brussels. On returning to Cambridge with her parents, she attended Cambridge High and Latin School where she graduated in 1929. May went on to study theater in New York at the Civic Repertory Theatre. After several years, she returned to the Boston area and started writing, teaching creative writing, and directing plays at the Stuart School on the Fenway.
Her first book, Encounter in April, was published in 1937. A year later she published The Single Hound, followed by a collection of poems, Inner Landscape, in 1939. During World War II, she worked for the Office of War Information in the film department. In 1945, she won the Gold Rose for Poetry and the Edward Bland Memorial prize. After the war, with the publication of the novel, The Bridge of Years, and a poetry collection, The Lion and the Rose in 1948, Sarton’s reputation expanded. Her short stories were published in The New Yorker and Harper’s Bazaar, and she wrote several articles for the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, The Kenyan Review, The Reporter, and others. She lived at 14 Wright Street in Cambridge and taught at several universities from 1950 to 1955 and served as Briggs-Copeland instructor in composition at Harvard from 1950 to 1952. In 1954 she wrote a biography of her father, I Knew a Phoenix, depicting Cambridge and the academic world in which she grew up.
After her father passed away in 1956 (her mother had died in 1950), May moved to Nelson, New Hampshire where she bought an old house (the subject of her memoir Plant Dreaming Deep). She wrote two novels, The Small Room and Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing. Because this second book depicted a lesbian affair, she was required to excise some passages before her publisher would agree to accept it. This book is considered the author’s most intense study of the feminine artist as a misunderstood and solitary individual. Sarton lectured at Harvard, Radcliffe, and Wellesley colleges, among other institutions. She was also a Guggenheim fellow in poetry. She held the Golden Rose Award for poetry, the Edward Bland Memorial Prize from Poetry Magazine, the Reynolds Lyric Award of the Poetry Society of America, the Alexandrine Medal of the College of St. Catherine, and the Perkins Memorial Award of Eastern Connecticut’s Thoreau School of Holistic Education.
She published two autobiographies, Plant Dreaming Deep in 1968, and A World of Light, in 1976. In the 1980s, she suffered a stroke, which left her unable to write for over nine months; later she published, After the Stroke in 1988. A year before her death, May published a last volume of poems, Coming into Eighty in 1994. She died of breast cancer in 1995, in Maine.
In 1996, a plaque commemorating her life and work, was installed on the grounds of the main branch of the Cambridge Public Library.
The following is one of her poems published in December 1992,
Bliss
In the middle of the night,
My bedroom washed in moonlight
And outside
The faint hush-hushing
Of an ebbing tide,
I see Venus
Close to
The waning moon.
I hear the bubbling hoot
Of a playful owl.
Pierrot’s purrs
Ripple under my hand,
And all this is bathed
In the scent of roses
By my bed
Where there are always
Books and flowers.
In the middle of the night,
The bliss of being of alive!
More of her poems are available at http://www.poetryfoundationorg, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/search?query=may+sarton
A list of her works can be found here, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_Sarton
Sources
Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org
Cambridge Chronicle, April 23, 1959; March 29, 1956; July 20, 1995
Cambridge Sentinel, October 31, 1925
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/sarton/blouin-biography.html
https://www2.cambridgema.gov/Historic/CWHP/bios_s.html
