For Ms. Sarton, poetry was her life's work. As she said: "When you're a poet, you're a poet first. When it comes, it's like an angel." Although she never had the full recognition attained by many of her peers, and never won a Pulitzer Prize or a National Book Award, her work generally received favorable reviews and she had a loyal readership. She was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and received 18 honorary degrees.

In "Encore," she admitted to being hypersensitive about criticism. As she once said, referring to a review of her novel, "A Reckoning," a bad review "is a drop of poison and slowly gets into the system, day by day." But nothing could discourage her from writing, not even a series of illnesses. Through her later years, she chronicled her life in journals. In "After the Stroke," a journal published in 1988, she wrote that she had discovered "for the first time perhaps what it takes to grow old," and, approaching 75, was determined to "recover and go on creating."

Speaking about the "rewards of a solitary life," she said, "Loneliness is most acutely felt with other people, for with others, even with a lover sometimes, we suffer from our differences -- differences of taste, temperament, mood." Quietly she waited for the moment to come "when the world falls away, and the self emerges again from the deep unconscious, bringing back all I have recently experienced to be explored and slowly understood, when I can converse again with my own hidden powers, and so grow, and so be renewed, till death do us part." Of Solitude, Mortality, Liberals, Friends and Fires Fruit of Loneliness

Now for a little I have fed on loneliness
As on some strange fruit from a frost-touched vine --
Persimmon in its yellow comeliness,
Or pomegranate-juice color of wine,
The pucker-mouth crab apple, or late plum --
On fruit of loneliness I have been fed.
But now after short absence I am come
Back from felicity to the wine and bread.
For, being mortal, this luxurious heart
Would starve for you, my dear, I must admit,
If it were held another hour apart
From that food which alone can comfort it --
I am come home to you, for at the end
I find I cannot live without you, friend.
From "Words on the Wind" ("Encounter in April," Houghton-Mifflin, 1937)

I watched the psychic surgeon
Stern, skilled, adroit,
Cut deep into the heart
And yet not hurt. . . .
Old failures, old obsessions
Cut Away. . . .
From "Letter to a Psychiatrist"

Here in Maine it is a cold start to the new year as a tempestuous ocean throws up fountains of spray at the end of my field and its ice on the dirt roads where I walk Tamas, my dog. But the cold is not only in the weather -- after all, we expect that, and we are bundled up; the cold is in the heart. I cannot remember a year when I was more aware of suffering and need, more aware of the botch governments make of human lives, more aware of my own helplessness as though the fire in me had frozen at the center.

When Tamas comes in from the snow, he shakes himself, and this evening I tell myself, as the moon rises in a brief respite from storm, that I must find a way to shake myself out of the frozen mood and start the fire going again. Hard times tempt one to run for cover and hide, wait it out, give up trying to act in the face of gigantic problems no one of us is equipped to solve. The temptation is to withdraw.

But, I tell myself, that is not what being a liberal is all about, however put down and cast aside we may be at the moment. Anger lights the fire when I see some people hanging their heads, allowing themselves to be persuaded that government cannot concern itself with the poor, the disabled, the old, the children. We may have failed, but if so we failed because we did too little, not too much.

We have got to warm ourselves back to the certainty that it is only when we lose the connection between ourselves and other people that we begin to freeze up into despair. That connection has to be kept open whatever happens. It is kept open by letters, by unexpected encounters, or by simply contemplating the points of light here or there.

From "Winter Thoughts" (The New York Times, 1982)

"Music I heard with you was more than music." Exactly. And therefore music itself can only be heard alone. Solitude is the salt of personhood. It brings out the authentic flavor of every experience.

Loneliness is most acutely felt with other people, for with others, even with a lover sometimes, we suffer from our differences -- differences of taste, temperament, mood. Human intercourse often demands that we soften the edge of perception, or withdraw at the very instant of personal truth for fear of hurting, or of being inappropriately present, which is to say naked, in a social situation. Alone we can afford to be wholly whatever we are, and to feel whatever we feel absolutely.

From "Rewards of a Solitary Life" (The New York Times, 1990)