Sara Teasdale (1884-1933) was an American lyric poet whose short, personal lyrics were noted for their classical simplicity and quiet intensity. Some of her work anticipated modern feminist verse and the intimate, autobiographical style known as confessional poetry.
Sara Teasdale was born in St. Louis, Missouri to a wealthy family. She had poor health for much of her childhood and hence was homeschooled until age 9. She started at Mary Institute in 1898, but switched to Hosmer Hall in 1899, graduating in 1903. As a young woman she traveled to Chicago and grew acquainted with Harriet Monroe and the literary circle around Poetry magazine. Teasdale's first poem was published in William Marion Reedy’s Reedy’s Mirror, a local newspaper, in 1907 and later that year she published her first volume of verse, Sonnets to Duse, and Other Poems. Teasdale's second collection, Helen of Troy and Other Poems, was published in 1911. It was well received by critics, who praised its lyrical mastery and romantic subject matter.
In the years 1911 to 1914, Teasdale was courted by several men, including poet Vachel Lindsay, who was absolutely in love with her but did not feel that he could provide enough money or stability to keep her satisfied. She chose instead to marry Ernst Filsinger, who had been an admirer of her poetry for a number of years.They married in December, 1914.
Teasdale's third poetry collection, Rivers to the Sea, was published in 1915 and was a best seller, being reprinted several times. A year later, in 1916 she moved to New York City with Filsinger, where they resided in an Upper West Side apartment on Central Park West.
In 1918, her poetry collection Love Songs (released 1917) won three awards: the Columbia University Poetry Society prize, the 1918 Pulitzer Prize for poetry and the annual prize of the Poetry Society of America.
Filsinger was away on business much of the time they were married and this caused a lot of loneliness for Teasdale. In 1929, she moved interstate for three months, thereby satisfying the criteria to gain a divorce. She did not wish to inform Filsinger, and only did so at the insistence of her lawyers as the divorce was going through - Filsinger was shocked and surprised.
Post-divorce, Teasdale remained in New York City, living only two blocks away from her old home on Central Park West. She rekindled her friendship with Vachel Lindsay, who was by this time married with children.
In 1933, she committed suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills. Her friend Vachel Lindsay had committed suicide two years earlier. She is interred in the Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis.
A large number of Teasdale's poems deal with love and death. Many of the speakers in her lyrics are women who face the death or desertion of a loved one. They also face the fact of their own mortality with disillusionment, though never as cynics. She was a poet who associated moral and spiritual beauty with the harmonies of the natural world. Teasdale's poems mainly chart development in her own life, from her experiences as a sheltered young woman in St. Louis, to those as a successful yet increasingly uneasy writer in New York City, to a depressed and disillusioned person who would commit suicide in 1933. Although later critics and scholars have marginalized or excluded Teasdale from canons of early 20th century American verse, she was popular in her lifetime with both the public and critics.
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Music Credits: Outside the box Patrick Patrikios
3 июл 2021
