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SARA TEASDALE, "FLAME AND SHADOW" OF A POET

Sara Teasdale was, after her chief rival, Edna St. Vincent Millay, the most popular woman writing poetry in America in the twenties and early thirties. Both concentrated on love themes and chose to compose in forms. But where Millay often cast an ironic eye on romance, Teasdale viewed the pangs and disappointments of human attachments with somber stoicism. Sara Teasdale was born in St. Louis, August 8, 1884, to a prosperous family. Her middle-aged parens were self-conscious about her late birth and overprotected their shy and hypersensitive child. She was first educated at home, then attended private schools. As a girl she was sickly, and throughout her life she suffered from a variety of real or psychosomatic illnesses that required frequent rest cures. After employing private tutors, maids, and nurses to tend to the invalid she created, her mother was able to keep the fragile child under her control until she was thirty.

Writing provided Teasdale an emotional and artistic outlet. It was also her only way of making money and thus of escaping total dependence upon her family. Her early work appeared in Reedy's Mirror, and her parents underwrote publication of her first, rather conventional book, Sonnets to Duse, in 1907. Helen of Troy came out in 1911. On visits to New York City in the early teens, Teasdale attended meetings of the Poetry Society of America, making friends particularly with older women helpful to her career, including PSA president Jessie Rittenhouse, who later arranged that she receive the Columbia Poetry Prize (precursor of the Pulitzer) in 1917 for her Love Songs. In New York she also met the editor Harriet Monroe, who presented her often in Poetry. Teasdale did not wholly approve of the magazine, which she felt was overly committed to Ezra Pound and printed too much material reflecting his difficult Modernist tastes. She did like the fact that Poetry paid. Indeed, she never contributed to a journal that did not pay.

Besides publication fees and prizes, Monroe offered Teasdale advice, and in 1913 even tried to play matchmaker. Asher ideal candidate she proposed Vachel Lindsay, the self-described "literary tramp" whose huge popular success Monroe had been highly effective in promoting. At the time Teasdale was already in love with the poet and editor John Hall Wheelock, who was cultivated, tall, dark, and handsome: all that Lindsay was not. She knew instantly that the improvident Lindsay was unsuitable as a spouse. In fact, in terms of social background, temperament, and artistic ambitions, they could hardly have been more incompatible. Teasdale gently reminded Monroe that Vachel was "a perfect child about money" and could never provide adequately for her, let alone children.

Meanwhile, Monroe's assistant Eunice Tietjens had offered a solid alternative, her friend the St. Louis businessman Ernst Filsinger, who Sara discovered was a secret admirer. Indeed, he had many of Teasdale's poems by heart and had fallen in love with her through her work. After a whirlwind courtship, they married in December 1914. The marriage was not a success, perhaps because of Sara's undressed or unresolved issues of sexual identity. (They never shared a bedroom, even when traveling by ship.) Yet Ernst remained utterly devoted. Teasdale was often alone in their fine Manhattan apartment on Central Park West, because Filsinger's successful shoe business took him abroad for extended periods. Finally, in 1929, she obtained a Reno divorce and received a generous settlement.

Whatever the personal costs of her unhappiness, as an artist Teasdale turned her depressions and losses into ever more subtly crafted and evocative verses. With the passing years, her poems became more taut and spare in their means, more direct in their emotional impact. Besides Love Songs, her other well-received later volumes include Rivers to the Sea (1915), Flame and Shadow (1920) and Dark of the Moon (1926). As William Drake records in his sympathetic biography, Sara Teasdale: Woman & Poet (1979), she became increasingly isolated, even as her popularity grew.

In her last years she was befriended by a college student, Margaret Conklin, who looked after her (no easy task, given the poet's gloomy self-absorption) and eventually became her literary executor. Death, which looms as an obsession in much of Teasdale's work, came through an overdose of sleeping pills on January 29, 1933. Her final poems were collected later that year in Strange Victory.