Sara Teasdale in The Yale Review

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Sincerity, feeling, melodiousness—these qualities certainly define Teasdale’s first suite of poems in TYR, which were published, just months after Bliss’s glowing review, under the heading “Songs in a Hospital.” But these verses are darker—perhaps even more “grotesque”—than much of her more famous work; Teasdale suffered from chronic illness and what we would now call clinical depression for much of her life, and these mid-career poems reveal an almost Dickinsonian sense of dissociative suffering. (“Waves are the sea’s white daughters, / And raindrops the children of rain, / But why for my shimmering body / Have I a mother like Pain?” goes one quatrain.) The same goes for her next contribution to the magazine, a quartet of poems she called “Songs for Myself,” published in the October 1918 issue. (Despite this phrase’s allusion to “Song of Myself,” the poems could not stray further from the sweeping, free-verse optimism of Whitman’s famous rhapsody.) The first of them, “Alone,” contains the line “Sometimes I am not glad to live” and ends by expressing envy for “the peace of those / Who are not lonely, having died.” Teasdale—like her young disciple, Plath—would eventually die of suicide.

Was The Yale Review where Teasdale sent her gloomiest verses? Her next contribution to the magazine was only a little less morbid. In the October 1921 issue, she published “Two Songs for Solitude”: brief monologues, in her trademark quatrains, about social isolation and estrangement. (The first, “The Crystal Gazer”—which later inspired Plath to write a poem by the same title—begins with an image of metaphysical potency unusual for Teasdale: “I shall gather myself into myself again, / I shall take my scattered selves and make them one, / I shall fuse them into a polished crystal ball.”) Both poems feature a speaker at odds with the world, judgmental of the “self-importance” of others, and eager to become “self-complete” and inexpressive.

literary scholars tend to agree that Teasdale’s work grew in emotional and technical complexity over the course of her career, with her final few volumes containing the most sophisticated, if also the least historically appreciated, poetry of her life. Her work’s unevenness is reflected in her ambivalent critical reception in TYR, where reviewers both applauded her musicality and reproached her wispy imprecision. The critic S. Foster Damon described her in our pages as “essentially a poet of brief, melodious moments, playing subtle variations on the quatrain.” (He also archly noted that about “one-fifth of her poems begins [sic] with the word ‘I.’”) Here’s a similarly lukewarm passage, by Stuart P. Sherman, about her collection Flame and Shadow (1920):

Almost too well, with a kind of operatic finish, [Teasdale] fills the air with a soft, amorous emotion, with suggestions of moonlight and music and heliotrope and the sound of the sea. One suspects her of having perfected a formula which yields infallibly the delicious vague yearning that all true lovers know, while the passion is still uncertain of its object and somewhat abstract.

Teasdale’s later poems in TYR, despite the general arc of her career, are somewhat more trivial—fuller of both “soft, amorous emotion” and “vague yearning”—than her earlier ones. In the January 1925 issue, she published five “Love Songs,” written in the simplistic, dewy-eyed style for which she is best known. (“Let my love be the pillow / Under your head”—blech!) “August Night,” the last Teasdale poem the magazine printed during her lifetime, vigorously refutes the fatalism of her earlier contributions: “I was glad of my life, the drawing of breath was sweet.”

Other reviewers saw Teasdale’s quietude and discretion as a strength. Perhaps the juiciest piece of Teasdale-related criticism in our archive comes from the writer Lee Wilson Dodd, who wrote admiringly of her earlier collection, the Pulitzer-winning Love Songs (1917): “Sara Teasdale never lifts her voice to make herself heard,” a fact that stands “in happiest contrast to the shocking overemphasis of so many American versifiers.” In the next sentence, Dodd names the poet Vachel Lindsay as the “worst offender” of this kind of bad bombastic verse, which suffers sorely from the lack of “the amazing literary tact of Miss Teasdale.”

Dodd likely understood the double insult he was leveling at Lindsay. A few years before, Teasdale—who was brought up in an affluent conservative family—had been passionately wooed by Lindsay before rejecting him on the grounds of his poverty and inability to “stir [her] to the depths,” as she put it in a letter to a friend. Just months after turning him down, Teasdale married the wealthy businessman and foreign trade expert Ernst Filsinger; her collection Love Songs, which Dodd so heartily commended in his review, begins with the dedicatory poem “To E.”

Wilbur L. Cross, TYR’s editor from 1911 to 1940, seems to have shared both Dodd’s high regard for Teasdale’s poetry and his skepticism of Lindsay’s; he published only one poem by the latter poet (who was much more famous than Teasdale in the 1910s) during his long editorial tenure. Lindsay’s lone contribution to TYR appeared mere months before Teasdale’s marriage to Filsinger, and its title seems hilariously on the nose when considered in light of its author’s romantic rejection: “The Tramp’s Refusal.” While the term tramp was probably intended to mean “itinerant person” and not “promiscuous woman who totally stomped on my heart” (the poem’s anxious subheading reads “On being asked by a beautiful gypsy to join her troupe of strolling players”), some lines clearly smack of unrequited love:

Overall, “The Tramp’s Refusal” is a middling poem in labored iambic pentameter. Is it simply a coincidence that the editors published it when they did—or were the staffers of TYR deliberately stoking the flames of literary intrigue? It’s difficult to know; the letters Cross and Teasdale exchanged in the following years were unerringly civil and admiring. Whether TYR’s editorial interest in Lindsay and Teasdale was purely professional or tinged with prurience, it didn’t end with Cross; thirty years later—more than a decade after both poets had died—then-editor Helen MacAfee published one final relic of their storied entanglement: a letter from Lindsay to Teasdale on the subject of “VICTORY” (all caps Lindsay’s), dated January 29, 1914.

MacAfee included the letter in TYR’s September 1943 issue, probably reasoning that its hopeful theme would resonate with a readership exhausted and demoralized by the bloodshed of World War II. But Lindsay’s preoccupation was with love, not military victory. At that time, Lindsay and Teasdale had nothing more than an epistolary romance, and his letter implies a longing for their future together: “The real victory is the victory at seventy-five or eighty years—or in the next life if there is one.” The foe Lindsay hoped to vanquish, in other words, wasn’t a political enemy but Teasdale’s romantic ambivalence toward him: “The victor is the man who having struggled in vain with his weakness, his habitual faults, a thousand times—still looks at them firmly, still acknowledging them to God, still planning to circumvent them—if not overcome them.” He implores his beloved addressee: “Come let us be victors in old age—and let us take a step towards it today.”

lindsay never did get his wish. In 1931, thirteen years before TYR published his letter in hopes of cheering a beleaguered public, Lindsay killed himself by drinking lye. By then, Teasdale had surprise-divorced her husband (a stunt that involved a secret trip to Reno under an assumed name) and retreated even deeper into a seclusion marked by mental illness and physical pain. Whether or not Teasdale ever loved Lindsay romantically, his death came as a blow to her; in the preceding years, the two had rekindled their correspondence and friendship. Her final volume of freestanding work, published shortly after her own suicide in 1933, contains a poem called “In Memory of Vachel Lindsay.” Her chosen title for the book? Strange Victory.

Plath may have had Strange Victory in mind as she drafted, in the days before her own death, the fiercer, more vivid writing that would later be collected in Ariel. The poems in Strange Victory were pulled from Teasdale’s last poetry notebook, where she had penciled them in her even, looping scrawl; the ones she didn’t want published were emphatically crossed out.

In 1950, however—seventeen years after Teasdale’s death—TYR printed one such crossed-out poem: “From a High Window.” (Teasdale’s friend had since donated the poet’s notebook to Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.) It’s easy to imagine why the editors might have chosen to rescue this particular poem from obscurity: a limpid, effortless Elizabethan sonnet that begs its readers to consider the ravaging effects of war from the perspective of a personified city. The beautiful and quintessentially Teasdalian ending, though, almost seems to have been written in the poet’s own voice: “Though I am lovely, I am not for long.”

There is something of a soap opera in the story of Sara Teasdale: rich parents, spurned lovers, shrouded sickbeds, tragic deaths. But her poetry is not confessional in the canonical sense; rather than trafficking in bold disclosures or narrative twists, it probes its subjects delicately, at a far remove, on strains of airy song. By publishing so many paratexts and poems—especially those about physical debility and social alienation—The Yale Review offers readers of its archive an uncommonly nuanced portrait of an artist torn to the last between a desire to hide and a compulsion to connect. Like the speaker of “The Crystal Gazer,” these writings, when read together, bring Teasdale’s many “scattered selves” into a fused, imperfect whole.