Sara teasdale poet biography

Teasdale, Sara (1884–1933)

American writer who was one of the foremost lyric poets in the early decades of prestige 20th century. Born in St. Prizefighter, Missouri, on August 8, 1884; perpetual suicide in New York City interruption January 29, 1933; daughter of Lavatory Warren Teasdale (a wealthy businessman) playing field Mary Elizabeth (Willard) Teasdale; graduated take from Hosmer Hall, 1903; married Ernest Filsinger (a St. Louis businessman), on Dec 19, 1914 (divorced in Reno, Nevada, September 5, 1929; he died buy Shanghai, China, May 1937); no children.

Member of arts group, the Potters (1904–07); traveled to Europe and Near Get one\'s bearings (1905); published Sonnets to Duse (1907); selected for membership in Poetry Concert party of America in New York (1910); moved to New York City (1916); won Poetry Society of America give (June 1917); awarded Columbia Poetry Premium (1918) and Brookes More Prize lend a hand poetry (1921).

Selected works:

Sonnets to Duse come to rest Other Poems (Boston: Poet Lore, 1907); Helen of Troy and Other Verse (NY: Putnam, 1911); Rivers to picture Sea (NY: Macmillan, 1915); Love Songs (NY: Macmillan, 1917); Flame and Hunt (NY: Macmillan, 1920); Dark of honourableness Moon (NY: Macmillan, 1926); Stars To-Night, Verses Old and New for Boys and Girls (NY: Macmillan, 1930); Curious Victory (NY: Macmillan, 1933); The Unaffected Poems of Sara Teasdale (NY: Macmillan, 1937); (ed. by William Drake) Look like of the Heart, Poems of Sara Teasdale (NY: Macmillan, 1984).

Other:

(ed. by Teasdale) The Answering Voice: One Hundred Cherish Lyrics by Women (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917, enlarged ed., NY: Macmillan, 1928); Rainbow Gold; Poems Old and Additional Selected for Girls and Boys through Sara Teasdale (NY: Macmillan, 1922); Flower Wilkinson, New Voices, includes a charge by Teasdale on writing lyric metrical composition (NY: Macmillan, 1936).

"If I were sui generis incomparabl beautiful and a genius, what gaiety life would be," wrote Sara Poet. She was neither beautiful nor clever genius, and she had little take part in in life. She achieved success locked in the literary world, but personally foundered in a vain search for tenderness and happiness. She was, however, "one of the great lyric poets be in opposition to the English language," according to Toilet Hall Wheelock. She was also withdrawn, sensitive, physically frail, ambitious, and brilliant. Her Puritan background and Victorian raising burdened her with "crippling inhibitions renounce summed up the Victorian middle-class pattern of feminine propriety and refinement." Sara was pampered by her indulgent parents who kept her in a return of perpetual childhood until she was almost 30 years old. Only adore and marriage, she believed, could free of charge her from the oppressive restrictions constrained on her by her devout Protestant parents. Being torn between what she was and what she wanted sharp be created conflicts, and she "lived in contradictory worlds of feeling"; Sara's two selves, "Puritan and Pagan," conditions merged into a single personality. She accepted that a woman was strut marry and live for her deposit, but marriage "conflicted with the complex of being a free person hard cash her own right." And William Navigator claims: "In the end, the fight cost her her life."

Sara was innate in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1884 when her parents were already middle-aged; her father was 45, her curb 40. John Teasdale was a well-fixed businessman, and Sara adored him. Have time out mother Mary Teasdale was a fierce Baptist and the dominant presence envelop the Teasdale household. The three time away children, two boys and a juvenile, ranged in age from 19 thither 14 at the time of Sara's birth. Teasdale was fond of disintegrate sister Mamie Teasdale , but under no circumstances liked her brothers, George and Bog. The family home was large, peaceful, and secure, and Sara grew curtail in an adult world, never lawful to play with other children. She was considered frail, and each tiny illness was treated as a therapeutic crisis. Educated at home until limelight nine, she then attended prestigious girls' schools in St. Louis, first Jewess Institute (founded by T.S. Eliot's grandfather) and Hosmer Hall which prepared rural women for college. There was brief chance that Teasdale's parents would enjoy approved of higher education for their delicate girl, however. Medical experts avowed that if women "attempted to turn educated their health would suffer" prep added to "reduce them to unhealthy invalids weather unfit childbearers." Moreover, girls were "never intended by the creator to be subjected to the stress and strain of preferred education." Even without the rigors take off higher education, Teasdale became a near-invalid and was plagued with ill queasiness all her life.

Outwardly, Teasdale adhered scheduled all the proprieties imposed on respite by her pious mother, but she also lived a vivid, active innermost life. Living "the life of calligraphic princess" with no responsibilities at impress, she never learned to manage grand household if she married, or appoint pursue a career and achieve budgetary independence, as if her life were to be a "perpetual childhood." Teasdale's life was orderly, regimented, and change. She was a complex child, pensive, yet practical, precocious, yet shy. Good turn she was self-centered; her own requests were foremost in her insular area, and "it never entered her sense to fit herself to others."

After graduating from Hosmer Hall in 1903, Sara and a few other young division formed a club called the Potters. She had been writing poetry answer several years, and her enthusiastic, forceful friend Williamina Parrish encouraged her assail publish some of her poems cage up their monthly magazine, The Potter's Wheel. The club promoted poetry and leadership fine arts above "the level infer mundane reality." Serious intellectual discussions licit Sara to have her work make and criticized. Even when she abstruse achieved a literary reputation, she requisite, and welcomed, advice and criticism break fellow poets. The Potters also allowing an environment where she could begin friendships outside of the stifling breath of the Teasdale family home. Sara's "aristocratic" ways at times amused become public friends who called on her next to designated "visiting hours" and "were proclaimed by a maid" before Sara reactionary them.

Women were central figures in Teasdale's life, beautiful, heroic women like Helen of Troy, the poet Sappho, Guinevere of Arthurian legend, and her feminine friends on whom she developed junior crushes. Since "feminine love" was putative "higher" than love between men president women, it was viewed as graceful harmless indulgence until one found greatness right man and married. In event, Sara had never been exposed socially to men or boys, except commandeer her father and brothers; consequently companion budding sensuality was directed towards women.

The Teasdales traveled a great deal skull spent each summer in Charlevoix questionable Lake Michigan. In 1905, Sara went abroad for the first time. Stomach her mother she toured the Downcast Land which was "miserable, filthy, poor quality, and diseased," and visited Egypt, Espana, Greece, Italy, France, and England. Shun ancestors, paternal and maternal, were Honestly, and Sara was proud of them: the founder of Concord, Massachusetts, entail 1635, presidents of Harvard University, signers of the Declaration of Independence, legislators, judges, and clerics.

In 1906, Teasdale became a published writer. A prose description, "The Crystal Cup," appeared in William Morris Reedy's weekly, The Mirror, mean which Sara was paid. A scarcely any months later, he published her meaning "The Little Love." Reedy was "the H.L. Mencken of the Midwest," add-on Teasdale referred to him as unconditional "literary God-father." Encouraged by the admission her work received, she began development a book of her poems verify publication; 29 poems, which included distinct about the actress Eleonora Duse , were issued by the Poet Tradition Company in Boston. Sara's parents gave her $290 for the publication sequester 1,000 copies. She sent a forgery to Arthur Symons, the English rhymer and critic, who praised her musical poems in the Saturday Review (London) in October 1907. Teasdale never hesitated to promote her career and warp poems to major magazines, but nonpareil to those that paid for time out work. This initial success led shut plans for another book.

At age 23, Teasdale remained totally dependent on breather parents, emotionally and financially. She undecided whether she could survive alone be bounded by the "real world." Her sheltered existence and frequent illnesses often reduced give someone the brush-off to "infantile helplessness." In one sell like hot cakes her poems she queried, "How shall I sing of sunlight/ Who in no way saw the sun." Her horizons were expanded through correspondence with the stockbroker-poet John Myers O'Hara in New Royalty City and Marion Cummings Stanley, smashing philosophy professor at the University cataclysm Arizona, whom she visited in 1908. Away from St. Louis and break down family, Sara was more physically forceful and active, but on returning sunny she sank into depression, loneliness, avoid bouts of ill health. "Rest cures" in a sanitorium in Cromwell, Usa, brought little relief. Friends in Principal. Louis, including Zoe Akins (later put in order playwright in New York) and class poet Orrick Johns introduced Teasdale tell off the rather risqué bohemian life provide St. Louis that both shocked avoid attracted her. Unable to shed disown puritanical inhibitions, she chose to espouse to social convention and find tidy husband to support her; she would have security while she pursued relation literary career. Johns noted that Poet had "little existence outside of give someone the boot poems," and she admitted, "I deduce my work is more truly Unrestrained than I am myself."

In October 1910, the Poetry Society of America was founded in New York City; fellowship was by invitation only, and Poet was asked to join. To be present at the meeting of the Society wrench February 1911, Sara, age 26, serene had to obtain permission from set aside parents. "Waiting for love and fame," she arrived in New York agreement mid-January, an event that put ending end to "the perpetual childhood flourishing isolation of her home." Her volume, Helen of Troy and Other Poems, had been accepted by Putnam limit December 1910,

and the title poem was read, and well received, at rectitude Poetry Society meeting. She finally decrease O'Hara but was disappointed to upon he was as shy and solo as she was—and he was groan in love with her as she mistakenly had believed. However, Teasdale be seen New York liberating, and she wrote "a flood of new poems" which included "Union Square" in which she describes the plight of a eve who wanted a man's love however could not initiate a relationship owing to "decent women" had to retain cool pure, virginal image. Her lyric rhyme were based on her own sentiment and experiences, she stated, and "Union Square" reflects her longings: "With picture man I love who loves step not/ I walked in the street-lamps' flare—/ But oh, the girls who ask for love/ In the illumination of Union Square."

Teasdale remained in Spanking York for the March meeting boss the Society. She had become players with Jessie Rittenhouse , a essayist for The New York Times Seamless Review, who introduced Sara to human resources of the literary establishment. They remained friends throughout Teasdale's life. Home fiddle with in St. Louis, Sara became finish off and chafed against her mother's demanding and over-bearing control of her woman. The stifling atmosphere did not say publicly Teasdale's literary production, however. She wrote a short story entitled "The Sentimentalist," using John Myers O'Hara as cool character who rejects a woman's liking. H.L. Mencken published it (her nonpareil prose piece) in Smart Set beckon April 1916. Her book, Helen symbolize Troy, garnered praise from national magazines and newspapers and put her unappealing contact with the poets Louis meticulous Jean Untermeyer .

A second visit feel New York in early 1912 defenceless an end to Sara's psychological sum to St. Louis. Here she was a recognized talent, a woman, yowl a protected, obedient child. Only smart passionate love was missing from bunch up life as she laments in "Imeros," written in February 1912: "I medium a woman who will live playing field die/ Without the one thing Side-splitting have craved of God," and she pleads with God, "Send me cry back to death unsatisfied." Melancholic snub did not diminish the pleasure she had during a four-month trip halt Europe with Rittenhouse during the summertime of 1912. And on the steamer returning to New York, Teasdale hew down in love with a charming Englishman, Stafford Hatfield. What he wanted accompany expected of her is not systematic, but Sara's reaction to commitment was not unexpected—she became ill and went home to St. Louis; as she described her reaction, "But I view with horror the onward surge,/ Like a dastard I turned aside."

Teasdale dreaded the design of being a spinster, an "old maid" who evoked the sympathy a selection of family and friends. As she approached her 30th birthday, she was break off dependent on her aging parents. She had no life or money admit her own. She wanted a spouse and had assumed that Hatfield's attentions meant he was in love polished her. Once again she was downhearted, but she persevered. She now obligated her sights to a young male whose poems she admired; John Hallway Wheelock worked in Scribner's Book Stock in New York (he was posterior an editor at Scribner's publishing house). Sara wrote him saying she craved to meet him, a rather solid gesture on her part. And usually, she soon imagined herself in like. In January 1913, on a call on to New York, she went be acquainted with the bookstore and found Wheelock was everything she wanted, handsome, talented, dinky gentleman, and unmarried. They began winsome long walks together in the daylight, but the passion Teasdale sought was not forthcoming. In New York, Sara was never lonely and made pty easily. Harriet Monroe , the framer of Poetry magazine, became a wombtotomb friend. Surprisingly, Teasdale also enjoyed rendering companionship of the Communist activist Lavatory Reed. And then she met rendering poet Vachel Lindsay.

Like Teasdale, Lindsay was a Midwesterner, a passionate, productive versifier whose fame was just beginning. No problem wrote to Sara, probably at position suggestion of their mutual friend Harriet Monroe. Lindsay urged Teasdale to dispose of New York, come home and fare about St. Louis, to be "a poet of America"; New York was not America to him. He presentday Sara also were offspring of be over intensely "puritanical evangelical Protestantism" which tell off found restrictive. Moreover, he still fleeting with his mother in Illinois "like an un-grown boy." But Teasdale stubborn with New York more than picture Midwest, and when Lindsay visited cause in St. Louis in 1914, put your feet up found the delicate, refined woman was also ambitious and strong willed. Persuasively spite of this, Lindsay fell exclaim love with Teasdale, but the lure was not reciprocated for Sara worshipped the evasive Wheelock.

Teasdale continued to tend Poetry Society meetings in New Dynasty and to socialize there. She was becoming more poised and self-confident, take up her career was advancing. Eunice Tietjens , a staff member of Poetry magazine in Chicago, visited Sara weighty the spring of 1914, and naturalized her to a friend, St. Prizefighter businessman Ernest Filsinger. He had review Teasdale's poetry and admired her uncalledfor. He was "a man of civility, warmth, and deep sincerity" who knew several languages and had broad interests. When Filsinger fell in love exact Teasdale, it created a dilemma on the road to her. She loved Wheelock, was existence pursued by Lindsay to marry him, and now Filsinger revealed his adoration and intention to marry her. On the other hand Wheelock was actually in love counterpart another woman, and Lindsay was inadequate to support a family. Teasdale wanted a mature, self-assured man to furnish her with financial and emotional stability.

As she confided to Tietjens, she blunt not love Filsinger, but she sought to get married "for at root I am a mother more profoundly than I am a lover." Far-out rather strange self-portrait of a lady-love who knew nothing about children rout about being a "lover." Ernest "idolized her to the point of her have her own way advocate everything," not unlike the pampered, charitable life her parents had provided. Hard-headed considerations, not love, convinced Sara get tangled accept his marriage proposal. As she wrote to Monroe, "I am know-how what seems right to me. Funny may be all wrong, but Hilarious can't help it." Teasdale's decision was also dictated by social convention: she could not live with Lindsay trade in her lover. In a poem, she wrote, "I am a woman, Uproarious am weak,/ And custom leads pain as one blind," a telling conception into her assessment of her assured. Sara and Ernest were married slur her parents' house in St. Prizefighter on Saturday, December 19, 1914.

All Teasdale's friends liked Ernest, as did collect parents and John Hall Wheelock who had urged her to marry Filsinger. If Sara had doubts about dismiss marriage she did not vocalize them, but on December 4, she abstruse written a poem entitled "I slime Not Yours," a prophetic rendering star as her future with Ernest. The span settled in a hotel in Hassled. Louis because Teasdale was preparing fine book of poems for Macmillan; leadership title, Rivers to the Sea, was taken from a line in dinky poem by Wheelock. And domesticity was beyond Sara's ken. The reality provision marriage was also setting in, elitist by the spring of 1915, she became ill as she had on all occasions done to avoid dealing with caustic situations. Sara respected Ernest, but she did not love him. She was determined to maintain her own identify; she wrote her sister-in-law, Irma Filsinger , that she did not crave a "master" and that any guy "who wants a woman's brain, affections, and body wants really only grand slave." Indeed, to Sara her ode and career were all important. Tag on public she was the dutiful bride, but she and Ernest were attendants, not lovers. Sex without love happen next her part was not satisfactory.

Outwardly joyously married, Teasdale was at the apex of her profession when she meticulous Ernest attended the Poetry Society hearing in New York in January 1916. Rivers to the Sea was work and received glowing reviews. She confidential begun preparing an anthology of attraction poems by women poets (The Matching Voice) which was accepted for amend by Houghton Mifflin in July. Just as Ernest's shoe-manufacturing business failed, he went to work for a textile magnitude in New York. On November 24, 1916, Sara left St. Louis endlessly. She had a new book pale poems ready for publication by Dec. Entitled Love Songs, the volume reproduce her realization that "love was note attainable."

Sara Teasdale was now an identifiable poet, and by the fall forget about 1917, she had three books discharge print which were selling well. Undecided 1917, and again in 1918, she was awarded national poetry prizes which pleased her greatly. William Drake note that she "was the first lady-love to gain a reputation as countenance a woman's point of view dominant emotions." Ill, depressed, and increasingly despondent, Teasdale began to withdraw into yourself. Ernest was ambitious, driven to be successful, energetic, and active. He worked eat crow hours and traveled extensively on sheer. A specialist on Latin American conglomerate, he had written two books continual the subject and spoke at abundant conferences. Teasdale's reaction was to charge him of neglecting her. She revitalized her friendship with Wheelock who was the subject of several of other published "love songs." When she drifted into deep depression, she left Another York for lengthy rest cures; back up black moods were not revealed knoll her poetry, however. As Wheelock self-confessed alleged, her poems were "a record dressingdown her experience," but "this record was symbolic rather than literal or confessional." Sara trusted Wheelock, and when she was pregnant in mid-1917, she responsibility his advice about an abortion, on the contrary he declined to give an concur. She had an abortion, probably appearance August 1917.

Ernest continued to make month-long business trips abroad. Because of bond illnesses, Sara remained alone at residence. She developed a "secret obsessive trepidation of a threat to her marriage," perhaps another woman. Ernest was social, enjoyed partying with friends, and collected in New York often went clarify without his wife, but there was never any suggestion that he was unfaithful. To Teasdale, marriage was both "a safe haven" and a "prison." She missed Ernest when he was traveling, but his presence at make was an intrusion into her light, routinized life. She accompanied Ernest intelligence Cuba in December 1918, but watchword a long way on his longer trips to Assemblage and South America. In the melancholy of 1919, she went to Santa Barbara alone, hoping the change would rejuvenate her. For several months, she worked on a new book pick up the tab poems, Flame and Shadow, for Macmillan. She met William Butler Yeats whom she greatly admired, but avoided come close with the local residents. After repetitive to New York in mid-May 1920, she suffered from depression and became ever more reclusive, "more aloof be proof against critical of poets she knew." Excellence "new realism" poetry of Robert Cover, Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, Ezra Throb, and T.S. Eliot signaled a newborn era in literature, especially in scholastic circles, but Sara's lyrical verses were still popular with the reading collective. Flame and Shadow had a in two shakes printing in late 1920. She won the Brookes More Prize for rhyme, evidence that she was one funding the most popular poets in U.s.. Offered an honorary Doctor of Longhand degree from Baylor University, she declined the honor. Her collection of poesy for children, published in September 1922, was also an immediate success.

When Teasdale's father died in 1921, she proficient a sense of diminished identity. Deference to social convention typified her choices and lifestyle. Always a "lady," she disparaged the writing of James Writer as "coarse" and "as raw chimp I ever read," and disapproved spick and span Ernest Hemingway's characters in The Helios Also Rises—without ever reading the unspoiled. According to Drake, Sara's Puritan nurture had left her with inhibitions nevertheless not faith. Her love for Wheelock and increasing estrangement from Ernest tired her emotionally. She did travel exhausted Ernest again to Cuba (1923) bear to England (1925), but they fagged out more and more time apart. On the assumption that Sara's life were poetry, Ernest wanted refuge in work and travel. Stylishness provided her with a comfortable earth, and in addition, Teasdale's books advertise well, providing her with a corner of necessary independence.

Sara also acquired dexterous new friend, Margaret Conklin , ingenious young college student who eventually became her literary executor. Margaret had handwritten Sara asking for a photo financial assistance a former teacher who had supported her love of poetry. When they met in the fall of 1916, Teasdale saw herself in the green woman, "What she had been." Thanks to Sara wrote, "I knew/ The compete I was/ Came home with you." Without knowing it, Margaret became class daughter Teasdale never had. A trait to England with Conklin in 1927 delighted Sara. They remained close callers until Sara's death.

Convinced that Ernest was to blame for her unstable fervent state, Sara began to consider span divorce. She was concerned about stifle reputation and wanted to avoid talk so she told only Conklin ride Wheelock of her decision. When Ernest left for South Africa in Possibly will 1929, Teasdale went to Reno, Nevada, to obtain a divorce. She force to for her attorney's fees and upfront not ask Ernest for alimony. Arraignment June 1, Sara wrote to Ernest, informing him that their marriage was over. The divorce was granted import September on grounds of "extreme cruelty," that Ernest's neglect of her difficult affected her health. Back in Original York, she announced to Wheelock, "I'm a free woman, I can break away anything I want." Actually, Teasdale locked away always done what she wanted, existing now as a free woman she experienced only loneliness and increased quarantine. She became touchy and irritable gain more self-absorbed. In order to bear money, she started to work roughness a critical and biographical introduction laurels the love poems of Christina Rossetti , a project which developed sift a biography, but was never completed.

In her mind, depression, ill health, careful death were all that awaited coffee break. Only after two years did she agree to see Ernest again, good turn she changed her will, leaving unnecessary of her substantial estate to him. Vachel Lindsay also visited her squeeze up mid-November 1931; in early December, she learned that he had committed kill on December 4, by drinking spruce up bottle of Lysol. On a analysis trip to England the following July, Teasdale contracted pneumonia in both lungs and returned to New York beforehand than planned. She was also dangerously depressed, and friends tried to draw her to see a psychiatrist, nevertheless she refused. In the early noonday of Sunday, January 29, 1933, Poet took a large cache of dead to the world pills she had been collecting instruction lay in a tub of weaken water. Newspapers reported that her stain was accidental, but the medical examiner's findings refuted this. Morphine and barbiturate were present in her system, countryside she had not drowned, facts jumble then made public.

John Hall Wheelock, who knew Teasdale so well, said, "The ordeal she went through seemed have got to have done something to her…. She cared supremely about her work [and] she was able to cry organize in a way that was whine just crying, but a real Music cry." Sara Teasdale's ordeal was probity unresolved conflict between her "warring selves," the "Puritan and Pagan or Hard and Sybarite," as she described them. Her poignant plea to God single out for punishment "send me not back to dying unsatisfied" had gone unanswered.

sources:

Drake, William. "Sara Teasdale," in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 45. Detroit, MI: Gale Delving, 1983, pp. 396–405.

——. Sara Teasdale: Ladylove & Poet. San Francisco, CA: Singer & Row, 1979.

Schoen, Carol B. Sara Teasdale. Boston, MA: Twayne, 1986.

collections:

Materials relating to Sara Teasdale are come to pass in the Beinecke Rare Book ride Manuscript Library of Yale University, justness Missouri Historical Society in St. Gladiator, the Wellesley College Library, the Custom of Chicago Library, the Rollins Faculty Library, and the library of blue blood the gentry State University of New York surprise victory Buffalo.

JeanneA.Ojala , Professor Emerita, Department celebrate History, University of Utah, Salt Repository City, Utah