One biographer said of Sara Teasdale's poems, "She had a gift as simple and natural as breathing. It caught one unaware and left the most critical mind astonished and helpless."

Sara Teasdale, born in St. Louis, Missouri on August 8, 1884, was the youngest child of middle-aged prosperous parents. As was the custom among upper class Middle-Westerners Sara and her friends attended a private girls' school, the Mary Institute, and moved in the fashionable literary circles of the town. Many of Sara Teasdale's friends wrote poetry also in the "genteel" tradition using romantic subjects and conventional verse forms of the early Victorian era.

But shortly before World War I a "new" Poetry burst upon the scene which sought to break away from the old romanticism and mythological references--a poetry that sought to portray actual life in the language of everyday people. Among the new innovators were Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, Amy Lowell, Edgar Lee Masters and Robert Frost.

By the new standards Sara Teasdale with her traditional technique and conventional rhyming patterns should have become one of the fleeting, soon-to-be-forgotten poets of the club woman culture. Instead her reputation spread and she gained admirers, for her poetry was entirely of herself, an expression of her own inner world; her poetry spoke to the heart and she remained uninfluenced by the "new poets."

Said Teasdale, "The poet must put far from him the amazing word, the learned allusion, the facile inversion, the clever twist of thought, for all of these things will blur his poem and distract his reader. He must not overcrowd his lines with figures of speech, because in piling these one upon another he defeats his own purpose...the poet should try to give his poem the quiet swiftness of flame, so that the reader will feel and not think while he is reading. But the thinking will come afterwards."

Sara Teasdale's poems show a mastery of cadence and rhythm, making her lines melodious; it is easy to be lulled into listening to the music of words that are deceptively simple, yet evoke strong moods and pictures--often with a surprise at the end:

"I Shall Not Care"

When I am dead and over me bright April
Shakes out her rain-drenched hair,
Tho' you should lean above me broken-hearted,
I shall not care.

I shall have peace, as leafy trees are peaceful
When rain bends down the bough,
And I shall be more silent and cold-hearted
Than you are now.

As Teasdale said, the thinking comes afterward.

In 1905, Sara took her first trip to Europe. Not lacking for money, she made subsequent travels to Italy, France and England. She fell in love with London, the birthplace and home of her life-long inspiration, the poet Christina Rossetti.

In 1907 her first book of poems, Sonnets to Duse, was published. The sonnets were tributes to the Italian actress Eleanora Duse, who had gained something of a cult following.

In the meantime Sara Teasdale also traveled to New York and Chicago, where she met some of the literary personalities in the "Chicago group," including Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay. There she also became acquainted with Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry Magazine.

Lindsay became Sara's worshipping admirer. He courted her with fantastic letters and he dedicated one of his poetry masterpieces, "Chinese Nightingale" to her. Although Lindsay was ardently in love with Sara and she was more than half in love with him, she would not marry him. Perhaps it was because a male poet or artist was not considered respectable unless he was very successful and making a great deal of money. Perhaps his exuberance and eccentricity overwhelmed her and she feared that her closely-guarded individuality might be somehow diminished or altered by the influence of such a personality. For whatever reason, in 1914 Sara Teasdale solved the problem by marrying a prosperous businessman, Ernst Filsinger, who was also one of her admirers and had a copy of every poem she had written.

The marriage was not a success and in 1929 without a word to even her most intimate friends Sara went to Reno and divorced him.

Sara Teasdale preferred New York to her home in St. Louis and she spent her later years there. Besides her recurring themes of love and loss she wrote of the places she visited, often in descriptions of dream-like beauty as in "Places" and "Fontainbleau." Other poems such as "Coney Island" tell us very little about the location--rather they seem to be merely settings for the poet's inspiration. As Marya Zaturenski observes in her introduction to Sara Teasdale's Collected Poems, "New York is there through that inner revery that she brought to all places...All she sees, all she feels is again drawn in upon herself; we see scenes drawn from her travels as through a thin veil of introspection..."

Sara Teasdale's poetry always contained a melancholy note; she could never find her "heart's home" in this world, nor the Beauty which she sought all her life. Her book Dark of the Moon published in 1926 became more autumnal in mood, even though the lyric quality of this book surpassed any she had written thus far. There is the music of the sea, of waves and flowers, of sand dunes.

The suicide of Vachel Lindsay in 1931 was a great shock to Sara, from which she never fully recovered. In addition, Sara's own carefully tended health was failing. Her last book Strange Victory seems to be filled with epitaphs:

"To The Sea"

Bitter and beautiful, sing no more;
Scarf of spindrift strewn on the shore,
Burn no more in the noon-day light,
Let there be night for me, let there be night.

On January 29, 1933 Sara Teasdale died from an overdose of sleeping pills.

In her forty-eight years she had published eight books of poems, including one volume for children, and had edited two anthologies. She was a prizewinner of the Poetry Society of America. Over the years she had begun collecting material for a biography of Christina Rossetti; in a posthumous tribute the New Republic compared Sara Teasdale's lyric gift to that of Rossetti, her inspiration.