“What is happiness but growth in peace.” In a culture predicated on the perpetual pursuit of happiness, as if it were a fugitive on the loose, it can be hard to discern what having happiness actually feels like, how it actually lives in us. Willa Cather came consummately close in her definition of happiness as the feeling of being “dissolved into something complete and great” — a definition consonant with Iris Murdoch’s lovely notion of unselfing . And yet happiness is equally a matter of how we inhabit the self — how we make ourselves at home in our own singular lives, in the dwelling-places of our own experience. That is what May Sarton (May 3, 1912–July 16, 1995), who has written so movingly about unhappiness and its cure , explores in her poem “The Work of Happiness,” included in her indispensable Collected Poems: 1930–1993 ( public library ).…