Sara Teasdale

Poet

• Born: August 8, 1884
• Birthplace: St. Louis, Missouri
• Died: January 29, 1933
• Place of death: New York, New York

American poet

One of the best-selling poets of the early twentieth century, Teasdale used traditional verse forms to express her perspective on love, beauty, and solitude.

Area of achievement Literature

Early Life

Sara Teasdale was born in St. Louis, Missouri. At the time of her birth, St. Louis was experiencing a cultural and economic flowering, brought about in part by its mixed population of transplanted Easterners of Puritan ancestry and recent German immigrants who stressed the importance of art and music. In 1884, the city was home to two universities, a museum, an art school, and numerous theaters where the great names in the acting and music worlds of the day sometimes performed.

The Teasdale family was of New England stock, descended from a dissenting Baptist who had emigrated from England in 1792. The poet’s grandfather was a Baptist minister who had moved his family west to St. Louis in 1854. John Warren Teasdale, the poet’s father, was a successful businessman. The ancestors of Sara’s mother, Mary Elizabeth Willard, included the founders of Concord, Massachusetts, two presidents of Harvard, and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Throughout her life, Sara would acknowledge the Puritan aspect of her character and its conflict with her more “pagan” poetic self.

Kept at home in early childhood because of her poor health, Teasdale began her formal education at the age of nine, attending a private school a block from her home, and she was graduated from a girls’ school at the age of eighteen. In 1903, she became friends with an artistic and intellectual young woman named Williamina Parrish, with whom she and other friends formed a club called the Potters. These young women were products of the active women’s club culture of the day and were themselves enthusiasts of and participants in the arts. For more than two years they produced a monthly hand-printed magazine known as The Potter’s Wheel. Among their artistic influences were the Pre-Raphaelite poets and painters, particularly Christina Rossetti; the Celtic Revivalist Fiona MacLeod (actually, Scottish writer William Sharp); the Greek poet Sappho; and actor Eleonora Duse. Most of the poems in Teasdale’s first book had originally appeared in The Potter’s Wheel.

In 1905, Teasdale and her mother traveled to Europe and the Holy Land. Teasdale was depressed by the dirt and poverty of what was then Palestine but loved Seville, Spain, and Paris, France, where she pronounced the Venus de Milo “the most beautiful thing on earth.” While in London, she sought out the homes of poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Algernon Charles Swinburne. The beauty that Teasdale found in Europe contributed subject matter for many of her later poems.

In 1906, The Potter’s Wheel came to the attention of William Reedy, the publisher of a weekly newspaper known for its sponsorship of new artists. Reedy published one of Teasdale’s prose sketches and a poem, thereby arousing her sense of professionalism and bringing her to the attention of poetry critics. The next year, the Poet Lore company published Teasdale’s first book, Sonnets to Duse, and Other Poems.

Life’s Work

On the surface, Teasdale’s life changed little following her initial publications, but she experienced a growing dissatisfaction with life in St. Louis and in her parents’ home. This period saw the beginning of her lifelong pattern of periodic “rest cures” (then prescribed to many ailing women) at various sanatoriums and hotels. She was proposed for membership in the Poetry Society of America in 1910, and in January of 1911, she made her first visit to New York City for the meeting of the society. Her second book, Helen of Troy, and Other Poems, was published by Putnam in October of that year.

Poetry Society membership brought Teasdale friendships with influential poets, editors, and critics. Her work also brought her into contact with John Hall Wheelock, the young poet who became the unrequited love of her life and the subject of many of her finest lyrics of frustrated love. Although he never reciprocated Teasdale’s romantic affection, Wheelock became the person to whom she turned in many of the later crises of her life.

In 1913, Teasdale visited Chicago and met Harriet Monroe, editor of the recently founded magazine Poetry. Monroe introduced her to Illinois poet Vachel Lindsay, then just becoming famous as the author of “General William Booth Enters into Heaven.” Lindsay’s midwestern aesthetic was nearly the opposite of Teasdale’s emphasis on careful craftsmanship in traditional verse forms, but he fell in love with his fellow poet and courted her with extravagant, lengthy letters and periodic visits. Teasdale remained fond of Lindsay throughout his life but found him exhausting and the prospect of a life of poverty with him terrifying. In December, 1914, she married St. Louis businessman Ernst Filsinger. Filsinger was passionately fond of the arts and a supporter of the twentieth century’s new developments in poetry. In the early years of their marriage, he and Teasdale lived in St. Louis and occasionally wrote poetry together.

Teasdale’s 1915 volume Rivers to the Sea found her experimenting withfree verse despite her original misgivings about the form. In this volume Teasdale found her poetic voice. Sonnets to Duse had been full of girlish enthusiasm, while Helen of Troy had consisted largely of dramatic monologues reminiscent of certain nineteenth century verse. Rivers to the Sea explored the moods of a love relationship from a woman’s point of view and spoke as well of renunciation and of the need for solitude and natural beauty. The book was well received, and its first printing sold out in three months.

Ernst took a job in New York City, in late 1916, and he and Teasdale moved to the city where she would live for the rest of her life. To spare her the energy-sapping details of housekeeping, they lived in hotels, and she was able to devote herself exclusively to her writing and the promotion of her books. Her 1917 book, Love Songs, won the first Columbia University prize for poetry, an award that in 1922 would become the Pulitzer Prize. This volume contains some of her rare poems of fulfilled love; more important, however, the section “Interlude: Songs out of Sorrow” sounds a theme that would recur with increasing frequency in Teasdale’s later work: that of using pain and grief as a means of attaining emotional independence from the accidents of life and love. In these poems, she also questions her Baptist upbringing, rejecting the notion of salvation through a personal god. The year 1917 also saw the publication of The Answering Voice, Teasdale’s anthology of love poems written by women. The title is a clue to the volume’s contents, largely poems detailing women’s responses to men’s love or lack of love. Most of the poets featured in the volume are such traditional favorites as Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti, and even the more experimental writers sound the traditional women’s themes of entrapment and escape.

Teasdale’s next book, Flame and Shadow (1920), continues the development begun in Rivers to the Sea but adds the theme of the failure of love to provide meaning in life. Instead of seeking fulfillment through romantic love, the speaker in these poems banishes passion to the realm of memory and seeks salvation through beauty, conventional religions having failed. Beauty is perceived as the only meaningful thing that will outlast death, here seen as the great enemy of humankind. These poems also show Teasdale continuing to experiment with form, since even the seemingly conventional verses vary rhythms in unexpected ways.

The next five years were difficult ones for Teasdale because they held the deaths of both parents, a brother, and her friend Amy Lowell. The only book Teasdale wrote during this period, Rainbow Gold (1922), was an anthology of poetry for children. Teasdale’s poor health and the overseas contacts required by her husband’s business necessitated frequent separations, often of several months’ duration. Despite Ernst’s obvious devotion, marriage failed to provide an emotional foundation for Teasdale’s life. Her 1926 publication, Dark of the Moon, expresses this darkening mood. Many of her familiar images the sea, the stars, the wind recur, but here they are not always positive. In one poem, the sea deceives humans into believing in their own immortality; in another, it erases all evidence of human presence. The speaker’s attitude toward death changes in these poems as well; in “The Old Enemy” death is now, “save when he comes too late,” a friend. The love poems here are calm and reminiscent, more recollections of past loves than celebrations of love’s possibilities. Solitude is more and more accepted as the condition of life. Despite the book’s essentially somber tone, its first edition sold out within two weeks.

This deepening solitude was typical of Teasdale’s life as well as her work. She had long refused speaking engagements; now she no longer attended meetings of the Poetry Society. The death of longtime friend Marguerite Wilkinson in 1928 deprived her of an important daily contact. In 1929, she traveled to Reno, Nevada, and obtained a divorce; the news reached Filsinger on a business trip to South Africa. The divorce and a new friendship with college student Margaret Conklin, who eventually became her literary executor, brought some brief happiness to Teasdale, but these were not particularly productive years for her. Between 1926 and her death, she published only a revised and enlarged edition of The Answering Voice (1928) and a children’s book, Stars Tonight (1930).

Possibly the most shattering event in Teasdale’s life was the suicide of Lindsay in December, 1931. After a period of adjustment to Teasdale’s marriage, the two had remained close friends, and the woman Lindsay married in 1926 had also become friendly with Teasdale. John Hall Wheelock, called by a hysterical Teasdale when she received the news of the suicide, viewed Lindsay’s death as the event that inspired Teasdale to take her own life a little more than a year later.

Teasdale’s last year found her writing poems again and working on a biography of Christina Rossetti. During a research trip to London, however, she became ill with pneumonia and was forced to return home still ill. Problems with high blood pressure and a broken blood vessel led her to fear that a stroke was imminent, and friends became concerned about her serious depression. On January 29, 1933, Teasdale was found dead of an overdose of sleeping pills. Her last book, Strange Victory (1933), was published after her death.

Significance

Teasdale’s work explores the moods and thoughts of a woman who studies her own reactions carefully. Furthermore, her writing explores the dilemma of a traditional woman in a transitional time, a time when formerly conventional notions about women and love have not died but are being found inadequate. Even Teasdale’s early, seemingly derivative work contains a questioning of the traditional view of her female heroes; her Helen and Guenevere are not simply the creatures of popular imagination. In addition, Teasdale’s best work has the musicality that distinguishes all good lyric poetry; she often claimed that the most important trait of poetry was melody, and she referred to her own works as “songs.” This aspect of her work began receiving critical attention in the late 1980’s.

Although her once-popular verse has fallen into oblivion among most professional literary critics, Teasdale has continued to speak to a popular audience. Evidence for this is the continued reprinting of her Collected Poems and of Mirror of the Heart, William Drake’s 1984 edition of her work, which included previously unpublished poems. Even feminist anthologies, which originally excluded Teasdale, began including her work in post-1990 editions.

Further Reading

Carpenter, Margaret Haley. Sara Teasdale: A Biography. New York: Schulte, 1960. This early biography is particularly good in its treatment of Teasdale’s early life, especially the Potter period. Its extensive use of letters to Teasdale also gives a vivid picture of her relationship with Vachel Lindsay.

Drake, William. Sara Teasdale: Woman and Poet. San Francisco, Calif.: Harper & Row, 1979. This psychologically oriented biography attempts to place Teasdale in the context of the transitional period between Victorianism and modernism. Although its conclusions about her motivations are speculative, this book’s attention to Teasdale as a product of her time and its conflicts offers a reading of her character that is less idealized than that of the Carpenter book.

Gould, Jean. American Women Poets: Pioneers of Modern Poetry. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1980. This collection of biographical reviews of early twentieth century poets gives a sympathetic overview of Teasdale’s life and places her in the first rank of lyric poets.

Mannino, Mary Ann. “Sara Teasdale: Fitting Tunes to Everything.” Turn-of-the-Century Women 5 (1990): 37-41. This brief study of Teasdale’s metrics places her in the context of turn-of-the-century experimentation and argues that the formal aspects of her work deserve more attention.

Schoen, Carol B. Sara Teasdale. Boston: Twayne, 1986. This chronological overview is the first book-length study of Teasdale’s work. Essentially sympathetic, it focuses on her use of images and on the development of her ideas about love, solitude, beauty, and death, arguing that the critical neglect of Teasdale’s work is unjustified.

Southern Humanities Review 40, no. 2 (Spring, 2006). The editor’s comment offers a brief overview of Teasdale’s literary work.

Walker, Cheryl. Masks Outrageous and Austere: Culture, Psyche, and Persona in Modern Women Poets. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Feminist in its focus, this study views Teasdale as representative of one reaction to nineteenth century views of women and women’s poetry. It holds that her treatment of the conflict between independence and the desire for love is archetypal.