May Sarton - Poetry Quotes

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

May Sarton
I feel often very close to the ecstasy and anguish which lie at the very heart of poetry — I am writing a lot.

May Sarton
For poetry exists to break through to below the level of reason where the angels and monsters that the amenities keep in the cellar may come out to dance, to rove and roar, growling and singing, to bring life back to the enclosed rooms where too often we are only 'living and partly living.'

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

May Sarton
Poetry is first of all a way of life and only secondarily a way of writing.

May Sarton
In poetry compromise is fatal. In action of any cooperative sort it is inevitable. The thing is to find the balance.

May Sarton
One thing is certain, and I have always known it - the joys of my life have nothing to do with age. They do not change. Flowers, the morning and evening light, music, poetry, silence, the goldfinches darting about

May Sarton
Poetry finds its perilous equilibrium somewhere between music and speech.

May Sarton
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?

May Sarton
I'm only able to write poetry, for the most part, when I have a Muse, a woman who focuses the world for me.

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
Poetry is a dangerous profession between conflict and resolution, between feeling and thought, between becoming and being, between the ultra-personal and the universal — and these balances are shifting all the time.

May Sarton
Go rich in poverty. Go rich in poetry. This nothingness is plentitude.

May Sarton