Born in St. Louis on August 8, 1884, Sarah Trevor Teasdale was educated privately; she graduated from Hosmer Hall in 1903. By that time she already had a reputation as a poet among her teachers and friends. With a few of the latter she helped produce the Wheel, a privately printed and distributed literary monthly to which she contributed some sonnets in 1904╨1907. A tour of Europe and the Middle East in 1905 greatly expanded her imagination.
Her first published poem appeared in the St. Louis weekly Reedy╒s Mirror in May 1907, and later that year she published her first volume of verse, Sonnets to Duse, and Other Poems. Her second, Helen of Troy, and Other Poems, followed in 1911. Rivers to the Sea appeared in 1915. In 1914 she married a St. Louis businessman (rejecting a second suitor, Vachel Lindsay), and in 1916 they moved to New York City. In 1918 she won the Columbia University Poetry Society prize (forerunner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry) and the annual prize of the Poetry Society of America for Love Songs, 1917. She also edited two anthologies, The Answering Voice: One Hundred Love Lyrics by Women, 1917, and Rainbow Gold for children, 1922.
Teasdale╒s poems were consistently classical in style: pure, openhearted lyrics usually in such conventional verse forms as quatrains or sonnets and technically excellent. But from her earlier poems to her later work in Flame and Shadow, 1920, Dark of the Moon, 1926, and Stars To-night, 1930, a maturing process apparently took place, with her poems evidencing an increasing subtlety and economy of expression. Her personal life was unhappy. Her marriage ended in divorce in 1929, and she lived thereafter the life of a semi-invalid. In 1932, while in London for research on a projected biography of Christina Rossetti, she was overtaken by an attack of pneumonia. Back in New York City and still in frail health, she took an overdose of barbiturates and died on the night of January 29, 1933. Her last and perhaps finest collection of verse, Strange Victory, was published later that year; her Collected Poems appeared in 1937.
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