Sara Teasdale was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on August 8, 1884, and received her education at the Mary Institute. Until her marriage in 1914 to Ernst B. Filsinger, a businessman, she lived either in St. Louis or Chicago; afterwards, she lived mainly in New York. She began publishing verse in Harriet Monroe's journal, Poetry. In her first three books of poetry, Sonnets to Duse and Other Poems (1907; about famous women, including the Italian actress Duse), Helen of Troy and Other Poems (1911), and Rivers to the Sea (1915), Teasdale revealed a remarkable ability to write simply and poignantly about common experiences. She quickly obtained popularity with Love Songs (1917), for which she obtained in the next year both the Poetry Society of America Prize and the Columbia University Poetry Society Prize (which became the Pulitzer Prize for poetry). Two poems in this collection, "Barter" and "The Look," are extraordinary. In bad health after her divorce in 1929, depressed by the death of her old friend Vachel Lindsay, she died on January 29, 1933, from an overdose of sleeping pills.
Carpenter, Margaret Haley. Sara Teasdale: A Biography. Norfolk, Virginia: Pentelic Press, 1977. PS 3539 .E15Z6 Robarts Library
Drake, William D. Sara Teasdale, Woman and Poet. New York : Harper & Row, 1979. PS3539 .E15 Z64 Robarts Library
Rittenhouse, Jessie Belle. Sara Teasdale. New York: Macmillan, [1938]. PS 3539 .E15Z93 Robarts Library