With Women Writers from America

Four collections of verse: Encounter in April, Inner Landscape, The Lion and the Rose, and The Leaves of the Tree; three novels: The Single Hound, The Bridge of Years, and Shadow of a Man; a fifth collection and a fourth novel that the wheels of the press will bring forth before the wheels of time bring forth the new year; and a scattering of poems in the leading poetry magazines — such is May Sarton's literary harvest.

She was born in Belgium and came with her family to the United States at the age of three. Her father is George Sarton, the world authority on the history of science, professor at Harvard, and for a time at the American University of Beirut. She did not accompany her parents to Lebanon during her father's work there, and so knew of it only images that tickled her imagination — of flowers filling our land, blossoming from the thorns, bursting out of the rocks. She studied in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the theater captivated her while still young, so she took up its study and worked at acting in New York for several years, until she published her first collection of poems in 1937, and it met with much approval from the critics; whereupon she abandoned the stage never to return and devoted herself to writing, alongside her repeated journeys to Europe. In 1940 she made a tour through the various American states lasting eight months, in which she lectured at a good number of colleges, and which was for her, as she put it, a "coming of age as an American," "for until then my heart had been divided." (She said that years ago, but her heart is divided to this day, as I shall mention shortly.) She then made other tours, lecturing on poetry and reading selections from her writings; she took part in writers' conferences, worked for a year in what is now known as the American Information Office, and at present she teaches English literature and writing at Radcliffe College and Harvard University.

I met her at her home, where she lives with her father, in a green suburb of Cambridge. And in the garden, where a red cat, leaping at every sparrow, kept troubling the silence of the flowers, we spent an afternoon she had set aside for The Woman's Voice, despite the hundred and eighty term papers piled on her desk and the various duties she had to finish before sailing, three days later, for France, Belgium, and Switzerland. We spoke a little of our present-day literature and of woman's place in it; she had found it curious that my interest should be in writing about America's women writers and not its men, so I assured her the reason was that the series is written for this women's magazine — or that is part of the reason! And she was astonished to hear that our women who write poetry today number three: a Palestinian, an Iraqi, and a Jordanian, with not a single Lebanese among them.

The talk branched out, and a large part of it turned on the problems that confront the poet. She holds that the poet's fundamental problem in our age is politics, and the degree to which the poet ought to let

himself be affected by it. Among the modern poets are some who were created to write lyric or reflective poetry, yet who insist on tinting their writings with the politics of the generation and its times, or on making their litera-ture a trumpet for a state or a doctrine, and the result is a blight upon their poetry — have you not seen how this current swept away even Stephen Spender and Archibald MacLeish? And yet the poet must not close his eyes to the pressing problems of the age, nor leave the managing of them to the men of politics and gov-ernment. The poet's dilemma is to know when to speak his word and when not to speak it: nothing is more harmful than the poet's throwing himself into the arms of politics — unless it be his divorc-ing her. Is not the poet a human being before he is a poet? Is he not one unified whole, and no mosaic? The contemporary writer must bear the burdens laid upon him and the many responsibilities that await him: has not the lesson of Germany sufficed to warn us — the day the writers fell silent at the beginning of the Nazi era and turned their backs on its tyranny, so that when it spread, they were forced, and the whole country was forced, into silence forever? May Sarton said all this with force and fervor; she holds that the writer has a mission that may not be neglected. And if it strikes you that despite this she writes nothing but lyric poetry, and that her string vibrates only to the creation of love and the whisper of beauty, she reminds you that she performs her duty in practice: she is a member of the executive committee of the American Civil Liberties Union, which fights against persecution in the land of liberty. She said: Would you believe that we struggle to guarantee to citizens the simplest rights and the first of freedoms — to guarantee even to writers and thinkers the right to live and the freedom to speak and to think?

The poet in America is worse off than his European colleague: the field of work before him