May Sarton - Poem Quotes

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I am furious at all the letters to answer, when all I want to do is think and write poems.... I long for open time, with no obligations except toward the inner world and what is going on there.

May Sarton
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.

May Sarton
Each new poem is partly propelled by the formal energies of all the poems that have preceded it in the history of literature.

May Sarton
One could go on revising a prose page forever whereas there is a point in a poem when one knows it is done forever.

May Sarton
It is clear that we do not exactly choose our poems; our poems choose us.

May Sarton
In the novel or the journal you get the journey. In a poem you get the arrival.

May Sarton
Try making a poem as if it were a table, clear and solid, standing there outside you.

May Sarton
I suppose I have written novels to find out what I thought about something and poems to find out what I felt about something.

May Sarton
Poems like to have a destination for their flight. They are homing pigeons.

May Sarton
For poetry is, I believe, always an act of the spirit. The poem teaches us something while we make it. The poem makes you as you make the poem, and your making of the poem requires all your capacities of thought, feeling, analysis, and synthesis.

May Sarton
I have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose-to find out what I think, to know where I stand.

May Sarton
The beginner hugs his infant poem to him and does not want it to grow up. But you may have to break your poem to remake it.

May Sarton
I write poems, have always written them, to transcend the painfully personal and reach the universal.

May Sarton