Description
Twayne Publishers [Published Date: 1972]. Twayne's United States Authors Series 213. Hardcover, 160 pp. No other printings listed.
Rare, out-of-print & unusual books · Since 1997
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Condition & notes
In very good condition/ NO dust jacket. Blue cloth covered boards with gold lettering on front and spine. Light bumping and scuffing to edges of covers. Binding tight. Light dampstaining along top half of fore-edges of text block. Otherwise pages are clean and unmarked. NOT Ex-Library. NO remainder marks. An early book-length treatment of Sarton's poetry and novels through the 1960's. Groups the novels under two themes: "detachment" for the early novels and "communion" for the later ones. [From Preface] The poet who is also a novelist may easily become identified with one of the genres to the neglect of the other. May Sarton, who places chief value on her poetry, is best known as a novelist. But her work is all of a piece, for the poems and the novels abound in similar themes and images. The novels have an inwardness, a careful, sensitive rendering of subjective experience that one would expect from a good poet; and the music of her prose is such that one is constantly tempted to read it slowly or aloud. . . The present study, the first book on May Sarton that has appeared, undertakes to show the unity of all her writing. After the first chapter, which summarizes her life as she recounts it in two books of autobiography and several autobiographical poems, the main body of her work is surveyed. The second chapter discusses her poems and her ideas about the nature of poetry as she has given them in articles, in lectures at colleges, and the novel, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing. The third and fourth chapters deal with her novels, but reference is made now and then to the poetry to show related themes. The last chapter summarizes the chief themes that have been set forth and evaluates her achievement as a writer.