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... the reason why there are so few first-class poets is that many people have intense feelings or first-class minds but to get the two together so that you will be willing to put a poem through sixty drafts, to be that self-critical, to keep breaking it down, that is what is rare. Right now most poetry is just self-indulgence.

May Sarton

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May Sarton
Age: 83 †
Born: 1912
Born: May 3
Died: 1995
Died: July 16
Diarist
Poet
Writer
May Eleanor Sarton
Many
Keep
Intense
Mind
Two
Critical
Drafts
People
Together
Minds
Indulgence
Reason
Poet
Sixty
Firsts
Poetry
Poets
Self
Willing
Breaking
First
Class
Poem
Right
Feelings
Rare

More quotes by May Sarton

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Go rich in poverty. Go rich in poetry. This nothingness is plentitude.
May Sarton
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The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind.
May Sarton
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There was such a thing as women's work and it consisted chiefly, Hilary sometimes thought, in being able to stand constant interruption and keep your temper. . . .
May Sarton
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I write poems about relationships, love relationships, and I'm not able to do that all the time. I could go two years without writing poems, and then write a dozen. Having a novel to work on, with the intricate puzzle of character and plot to work out, is satisfying for the time there is no poetry.
May Sarton
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I asked myself the question, 'What do you want of your life?' and I realized with a start of recognition and terror, 'Exactly what I have - but to be commensurate, to handle it all better.
May Sarton
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One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.
May Sarton
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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
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It is dangerous it seems to me for a civilization when there is a complete abyss betewen people in general and the artists. Or is it always so? The poets who are most ardently on the people's side write in such a way that the people cannot see rhyme nor reason to their work.
May Sarton
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The creative person, the person who moves from an irrational source of power, has to face the fact that this power antagonizes. Under all the superficial praise of the creative is the desire to kill. It is the old war between the mystic and the nonmystic, a war to the death.
May Sarton
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There is a wilder solitude in winter When every sense is pricked alive and keen.
May Sarton
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I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful hault, 'won't go,' or, even worse, explodes in some innocent person's face.
May Sarton
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Once more I realize that solitude is my element, and the reason is that extreme awareness of other people (all naturally solitary people must feel this) precludes awareness of one's self, so after a while the self no longer knows that it exists.
May Sarton
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Routine is not a prison, but the way into freedom from time.
May Sarton
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I believe that children long for form just as grownups do, and that it releases rather than cramps creative energy.
May Sarton
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My own feeling is that the only possible reason for engaging in the hard labor of writing a novel, is that one is bothered by something one needs to understand, and can come to understand only through the characters in the imagined situation.
May Sarton
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The ambience here is order and beauty. That is what frightens me when I am first alone again. I feel inadequate. I have made an open place, a place for meditation. What if I cannot find myself inside it?
May Sarton
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Public education was not founded to give society what it wants. Quite the opposite.
May Sarton
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Lunches are just not good. They take the heart out of the day and the spaciousness from the morning's work.
May Sarton
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It feels a long way up and down from zero.
May Sarton
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What can I have that I still want?
May Sarton