Manuscript of May Sarton's "Of the Muse," 1966

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For pride month, VQR celebrates the prolific poet and novelist May Sarton. Over the course of the 1950s and ’60s, VQR published nearly a dozen of Sarton’s poems, including a suite of poems that won the Emily Clark Balch Prize for Poetry in 1966. “Of the Muse” was the first poem in the suite and was later included in her 1984 collection Letters from Maine (W. W. Norton). While often celebrated as a lesbian and feminist poet, Sarton frequently emphasized her belief that her work is “universal and human on the deepest level,” and that she sees herself as “a maker of bridges—between the heterosexual and the homosexual world, between the old and the young.”