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The Creative Crone: Aging in the Poetry of May Sarton,
Gwendolyn Brooks, and Adrienne Rich

Description of Project:

Our society as a whole is becoming older as we usher in the twenty-first century, yet that has not significantly changed perceptions of aging and the elderly. Ageism-the discrimination against individuals based upon age and particularly advanced age-and gerontophobia-the fear of aging and disgust for the elderly-are still widespread, widely accepted, and largely unexamined phenomena. Positive ageism-the stereotyping that casts the elderly as wise mentors who have no needs of their own-and reverse-ageism-ageism directed against the young-are two forms of discrimination that, though less directly harmful in one case and transitory in the other, also limit individuals' lives and must, as such, be critically examined as well.

My current project, a book manuscript titled The Creative Crone: Aging in the Poetry of May Sarton, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Adrienne Rich, seeks to fill the void created by the virtual absence of a sustained cultural discourse on aging and late-life creativity. In the study and in its title, the term "crone" is provocatively linked to creativity so as to convey that these two concepts are far from being mutually exclusive. As Sarton, Brooks, and Rich show, "creative" and "crone" instead combine to create a radical and powerful resistance to what some theorists have termed the "death by invisibility" encountered by the elderly long before biological processes terminate their lives. Rather than yielding to the stark binary opposition that equates young with good and old with bad, these three poets critically evaluate and, finally, embrace their roles as old poets or "creative crones." American contemporaries, poets, and women, all three have experienced the compound effect of sexism and ageism, and all three have succeeded in transforming such double-oppression into an affirmation of old age and late-life creativity.

The striking differences among these poets, combined with such shared points, also contribute to the long postponed discussion of aging and creativity. Sarton is a bisexual poet from the white middle-upper class of her native Belgium and New England, Brooks a heterosexual who primarily identifies with Chicago's lower-class African-American community, and Rich a middle-class Jewish lesbian for whom both coasts of the United States have been home. Such divergent backgrounds have in part resulted in Sarton's primary focus on sexual and emotional expression, Brooks' emphasis on racial injustice, and Rich's concern with "global injustice" in general and gender inequity in particular. Yet as the three poets' later work reflects different emphases, it highlights, in all three cases, a need to resist ageism in order to fight other forms of discrimination. It is the poets' differences, combined with a shared desire to sustain into late life the poetic expression of what they have individually defined to be vital concerns, that help us recognize the rich dimensions old-age creativity assumes.

Sarton defies traditional notions of old age by displaying, from the very beginning of her career, what frequently amounts to an outright obsession with old age and death. She always wanted to be old, always loved individuals older than herself, and delights in pointing out the pleasures of old age. She consistently makes aging the theme of her poetry (and prose), thereby radically breaking through the silence surrounding this taboo and making advanced age graspable for those who read her. In later life, the poet, who died in 1995 at age 83, becomes more realistic about the disadvantages of aging, but she continues to use aging as a resource of creativity. Sarton is as prolific as ever in her late life, but her style becomes more minimalist because, having defined a "time of her own," she lives in and for essences. Her poetry, even her final volume Coming into Eighty (1994), is pervaded by an eroticism that challenges our culture's notion that desire eventually and necessarily diminishes. Proud to be a crone, Sarton infuses her late life-her imaginary and real gardens-with celebration, vitality, and sexuality. Generating a poetic discourse that situates her in "one overwhelming / NOW!" she presents herself as a survivor for whom being old means being "whole."

The older Gwendolyn Brooks becomes, the less time she has for passivity. Rather than a reason for despair, advanced age is an energizing reminder to try to continue what she began mid-career, using the loudest, most direct voice possible to speak for her race. Up to her death at age 83, Brooks attends to her own aging only indirectly by focusing on reverse-ageism. Her advanced age prompts her to write verse that centers on what she perceives to be an utterly imperiled black youth and that argues for the urgent necessity of using black and white adult power to support rather than suppress generations of young blacks. Brooks' exploration of the intersection of racism and reverse-ageism is most crucially developed in such collections as Children Coming Home (1991). As she ages, the poet increasingly casts herself as mother to her race. "Gwendolyn, Mother of All," however, little resembles the stereotype of grandmotherly devotion that results from positive ageism. Instead, she redefines motherhood, dissociating it from biological imperatives and maternal sacrifice and transforming it into a recurrent call-sometimes angry, sometimes patient, but always passionate-that demands active response.

Like Sarton, Rich, now 72, often imagines age and death in her early work, and like both Sarton and Brooks, she embraces the role of the old poet in her later poetry. She has devoted herself to what I term "a poetry of repair," but, rejecting both positive and negative assumptions about the role of the elderly, such repair is directed neither exclusively outward nor exclusively inward. As Rich creates longer poetic units-all-inclusive Whitmanian lines, long poems, ellipses that contain all that cannot be said immediately and directly-she seeks to shoulder and encompass the difficulties of this world, as the title An Atlas of the Difficult World suggests (1991). But her later poems also reflect her desire for self-repair and growth. She engages in a kind of "self-canonization," a correction of the literary canon that places poets like herself in more prominent positions. Rich moreover uses her later poetry to face her troubled family relationships and to establish a creative counterforce to her deteriorating physical condition. As already apparent in her volume Time's Power (1989), Rich has redefined the passage of time as a beneficial resource rather than a threat, putting the "wild patience" she first discussed in the 1980s to energetic use.

Implicitly and explicitly, then, Sarton, Brooks, and Rich validate late-life activity and creativity, as well as late life itself. Old age, to them, is crucial to inducing necessary change and to repair-ing and maintaining their selfhood as well as "the difficult world" surrounding them. All three show that old age, as we habitually think of it, is in part socially constructed and can, therefore, be reinterpreted and acknowledged as a meaningful and indispensable phase of life. By discussing how these three women poets from radically different backgrounds have each successfully resisted the lapse into invisibility in old age, the project aims to help correct the prevailing illiteracy about aging as it broadens the scope of feminist inquiry. At the same time, The Creative Crone: Aging in the Poetry of May Sarton, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Adrienne Rich attempts to give the later work of three important American women poets the literary attention it deserves.

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