The Author

Sara Teasdale [Teasdale’s Poems]

1884–1933

poet

American poet Sara Teasdale was born August 8, 1884, in St. Louis, Missouri, to merchant John Warren and Mary Elizabeth (Willard) Teasdale. She wrote several volumes of delicate and highly personal lyrics, including Helen of Troy and Other Poems (1911), Rivers to the Sea (1915), Flame and Shadow (1920), and Strange Victory (1933).

After attending Mrs. Lockwood's School and the Mary Institute she graduated from Hosmer Hall in 1903. Between 1904 and 1907 Teasdale and a group of friends published a monthly literary magazine, The Potter's Wheel, which met with success in St. Louis.

Teasdale traveled extensively and made frequent trips to Chicago, where she eventually became part of Harriet Monroe's Poetry magazine circle and met numerous other poets. After rejecting the poet Vachel Lindsay as a suitor, she married St. Louis businessman, Ernst Filsinger, in 1914. Fifteen years later, she would divorce Filsinger against his wishes.

"Guenevere" was Teasdale's first poem to be printed, appearing in Reedy's Mirror in 1907. Teasdale's first book, Sonnets to Duse and Other Poems, was published by Poet Lore in the same year. In 1918 Teasdale was awarded the annual prize of the Poetry Society of America and the Columbia University Poetry Society Prize (forerunner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry) for Love Songs.

Popular during the early twentieth century, Teasdale's poems appeared in numerous periodicals including Harper's, Scribner's, Century, Forum, Lippincott's, Putnam's, Bookman, and New Republic.

On January 29, 1933, having become increasingly depressed and reclusive, Sara Teasdale committed suicide through an overdose of sleeping pills. She was buried in St. Louis, Missouri.

Source:

www.lib.udel.edu/ud/spec/findaids/teasdale.htm

www.newtrix.com/poems/ st-oldmaid.htm

Poems by the Author

1. When I am not with You
2. Love Songs