Sara Teasdale

Sara Teasdale
Teasdale in 1919
Born	Sara Trevor Teasdale (1884-08-08)August 8, 1884 Saint Louis, Missouri, United States
Died	January 29, 1933(1933-01-29) (aged 48) New York City, United States
Occupation	Poet
Notable work(s)	Flame and Shadow, Love Songs

Sara Teasdale (August 8, 1884 – January 29, 1933) was an American lyrical poet. She was born Sara Trevor Teasdale in St. Louis, Missouri, and after her marriage in 1914 she went by the name Sara Teasdale Filsinger.

Biography

Sara Teasdale was born on August 8, 1884. She had poor health for most of her life, and it was only at age 14 that she was well enough to begin school. In 1898 she began attending Mary Institute, but switched rapidly to Hosmer Hall in 1899, where she finished in 1903.

Teasdale's first poem was published in Reedy's Mirror, a local newspaper, in 1907. Her first collection of poems, Sonnets to Duse and Other Poems, was published that same year.

Teasdale's second collection of poems, 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, on December 19, 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 the 1918 Pulitzer Prize for poetry – the first woman to do so – that was sponsored by the Poetry Society of America.

Filsinger was away a lot on business which 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 died by suicide, overdosing on sleeping pills. Her friend Vachel Lindsay had died by suicide two years earlier. She is interred in the Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis.

Teasdale's suicide and "I Shall Not Care"

A common urban legend surrounds Teasdale's suicide. The legend claims that her poem "I Shall Not Care" (which features themes of abandonment, bitterness, and contemplation of death) was penned as a suicide note to a former lover. However, the poem was actually first published in her 1915 collection Rivers to the Sea, a full 18 years before her suicide:

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.

Legacy and influence

• A beautifully translated Chinese version of the poem "Like Barley Bending" became wildly popular in China in 2013 due to resurrecting debates and controversies surrounding a 19 year old thallium poisoning case (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhu_Ling_(poisoning_victim) ). The young girl who made the translation, Zhu Ling, was poisoned when she was a sophomore at China’s prestigious Tsinghua University in 1994. She was permanently paralyzed and now clings to her life 19 years after the poisoning. The case was never solved and many Chinese believe that the main suspect was released without prosecution because of her family’s political connections. The translation was made while Zhu Ling was in high school. The content of the poem, to a great degree, matches her own tragic fate years later. Reading her translation today, one cannot help but feel that she was translating the poem for herself, reflecting the spirit of persistence and struggle that helped her go through all these difficult years after the poisoning. Many Chinese readers view the poem as a symbol of rising up together, no matter how weak or small each individual is, to bravely pursue justice and freedom under a big oppressive corrupted system.

• The poem "There Will Come Soft Rains" from her 1920 collection Flame and Shadow inspired and is featured in a famous short story of the same name by Ray Bradbury.
• In 1967 Tom Rapp and the group Pearls Before Swine recorded a musical rendition of "I Shall Not Care" on their first album One Nation Underground.
• In 1994, she was inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame.
• In 2010, Teasdale's works were for the first time published in Italy, translated by Silvio Raffo.

Translations

• Тисдейл С. Реки, текущие к морю: Избранные стихотворения (in Russian). – Moscow: 2011. – 192 pages. ISBN 978-5-91763-062-5

External links

• Works by Sara Teasdale at Project Gutenberg
• Sara Teasdale's Photo & Gravesite at findagrave
• Our Poets of Today by Howard Willard Cook (1918 book) (Google Books copy)
• Modern American poetry by Louis Untermeyer (1921 book) (Google Books copy)she wrote over 600 poems.