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The Strange Victory of Sara Teasdale by Marya Zaturenska If every book must eventually find its own destiny, then the Collected Poems of Sara Teasdale has had a strange and enviable one. Though she is not among the names most mentioned in fashionable reviews, her poems seem secure among the noises of present controversy and changing techniques. One has a feeling that as time passes she will endure in some clear atmosphere of her own, when many better-known names are forgotten or are merely footnotes to literary history. For if not talked about, she is read and loved and quoted by people of discrimination. Her Collected Poems, first published in 1937, has gone into multiple printings and still shows no sign of falling off. It is obvious that a new generation is still calling for her work. Sara Teasdale was the youngest child of middle-aged, prosperous parents, who treated her with doting affection. Like many children spoiled by affectionate parents, she seemed none the worse for it. She grew up to be a well-poised, delicate, modest, sensitive woman accustomed to giving and receiving affection, and quietly sure of herself and her gifts. She was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on August 8, 1884. Within three or four years after her birth two other poets were born in her native city whose work was so dissimilar to hers that they seemed to belong to another world--Marianne Moore and T. S. Eliot. It is characteristic of her and of her self-containment that she moved in entirely different literary circles and probably never met them. Yet she went to a girls' school founded by T. S. Eliot's grandfather, the Mary Institute, where the strict standards and high idealistic thinking bore witness to the New England emigration to the Middle West. Like the Eliots, the Teasdales were of New England descent and of pure English Colonial stock. "If it were not for a matter of sex," Mr. Eliot remarked in a lecture before the school in I959, "I would have attended Mary Institute myself." The influence of the school and the strong, one might almost say feminist, atmosphere that emanated from it can be found in certain documents contained in what might be called her official biography by Margaret Haley Carpenter. This is a book mainly valuable for facts it contains about her life that might otherwise be lost, and for the photographs and letters that give the reader in search of the sources of Sara Teasdale's poetry clues that partially—but only partially—explain the almost inexplicable. For there is a mystery about Miss Teasdale's work—on the surface so slight, so simple, so conventional in form. It is only on rereading that one recognizes her uniqueness, that one encounters something that amounts to genius. Very interesting in Miss Carpenter's book are the photographs of Sara Teasdale's early friends and associates—mostly upper-class Middle-Western girls, smiling, self-confident, very refined, but wholesome too. They are dressed up in elaborate costumes for school plays, or attired in simple, even for that day old-fashioned dresses cut out, we may be sure, of the best material. The Victorian era died slowly in the Middle West, and it is not till much later (till after World War I) that the daring and the dash of Edwardian England affects the figures that peer out of these early photographs. Faint whispers of the Pre-Raphaelites, of Ernest Dowson, of Arthur Symons, of Walter Pater were slowly penetrating cultivated circles in that region. The Celtic Twilight mostly Pre-Raphaelite in its origins was beginning to be heard. Sara Teasdale and her friends were especially fond of the poetry of Mary Robinson, now almost forgotten but much admired in the 1890s. Among Mary Robinson's admirers were such "decadents" as John Addington Symonds, and that lady of great gifts and intellect who wrote under the name of Vernon Lee and who was to be Mary Robinson's companion over many years. But it seems that Miss Teasdale and her friends saw the naughty nineties through a glorified romantic haze, saw their favorite belated Raphaelites with the same romantic blur with which they admired the paintings of Maxfield Parrish or Edmund Dulac—both refined, poetic, and advanced artists in their eyes. It was a pleasant life full of "cultural activities" and girlish enthusiasms. Many of Sara Teasdale's friends wrote poetry too, well-made, romantic, conventional verse in what is now known as the "genteel tradition." They were full of simple, refined sentiments; they breathed a love of nature and art. They rarely mentioned religion, for in that aspect the world of Sara Teasdale reflected the manner of the well-bred English churchgoer of the period. Religion, like sex, was a private, a personal affair. One went to church regularly but one did not talk of it. The metaphysical poets were being discovered, and though it is possible that in later years Sara Teasdale read them, there is no trace of them in her poetry. There is no religion in her poetry and very little metaphysics, and when the cult of metaphysical poets reached its height in the 1920s, this absence may have accounted for her neglect by the rising school of academic critics. Yet it is well to remember Sara Teasdale's lifelong admiration for Christina Rossetti, for to accept Christina Rossetti without accepting her devotional inspiration would be something of a feat! But then, one also recalls that the devotees of the metaphysicals, and later the admirers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, admired them for everything but their subject matter. What can we say of this but to echo Mallarme, who had said, "Poetry is written with words and not ideas." Culture, as it came to be known in the Middle West at that time, was a product of the great prosperity, the slowly growing interest in the arts that arose from this prosperity, and the greater leisure afforded those women whose husbands or fathers were away all day making money. Foreiners were beginning to notice that the women of the wealthy or well-to-do constituted their chief audience at lectures, and were better informed, better read, intellectually more alert than the men, who usually left "artistic matters" to their wives. The Oscar Wilde scandal had broken in England not too long before and its echoes, devastating to the arts in England, had their effect here too. A poet, an artist, was not quite respectable unless he was very successful—which meant he was making a great deal of money—though poetry, painting, music prettily practiced were considered attractive accomplishments for a superior and not unattractive girl. The image of the male artist or poet was more than unusually forbidding when something as serious as marriage was concerned. Was this one of the reasons why Sara Teasdale, when courted by Vachel Lindsay, whom she admired and held in deepest affection and sympathy, preferred to marry a solid well-to-do businessman? He was the kind of man approved in her circle, artistic but not eccentric, unless his liking for poetry could be considered as such. Given the circumstances and the period, Sara Teasdale might have become any one of the minor women poets who were filling the popular magazines of the day and who were as numerous as they were in Edgar Allan Poe's time. Only instead of imitating Felicia Hemans, Lord Byron, and Tom Moore and the early Elizabeth Browning, they were now imitating the Elizabeth Browning of the legend and the love sonnets and the better-known minor English poets of the end of the nineteenth century. A quick glance at Clarence Stedman's anthology of late Victorian verse will prove how many there were of them, how much competence they had gained since Poe's day—and yet how lackluster most of them seem when read a decade or two after their time. However, one of the most publicized of women poets in the early years of the century was not a poet who would have been read by Sara Teasdale's circle—though she lived to become an honored guest of the Poetry Society of America. Ella Wheeler Wilcox's poems were not as passionate as they were said to be, nor was her popular volume Poems of Passion as naughty as she thought it was, but her poems had a certain significance. Mrs. Wilcox (1850-1919) was a Middle Westerner too, but one who had come up the hard way from a background that no one would have called cultured. In her innocently passionate revolt she was a symptom of what was to happen later to a whole generation of Middle-Western youth--especially to those who were beginning to read Balzac and Guy de Maupassant and had seen Paris during and after World War I. If it was hard to bring them back to the farm after they had seen "Paree," it was equally hard to bring them back into the gentilities of Poetrv Society and club-women culture. In some respects their lack of traditional reverence stood them in good stead. Where Boston collectors and museums were buying paintings by Burne-Jones, Puvis de Chavannes, Sargent, or Lord Leighton, Chicago was already buying the French Impressionists. Indeed, as Henry James had discovered, good Middle Westerners felt happier and more at home in Paris than in London. But it was in London, in England, that Sara Teasdale felt most at home. For she and her poetry belonged to the old tradition. When the poetry renaissance burst upon the scene shortly before the first World War, Miss Teasdale's language, her subject matter, her very traditional technique ought to have disqualified her from any honorable place among the innovators of the new poetry. Yet—and this was the mystery—her reputation spread among poetry lovers who were both critical and aware of the new poetry. She had in fact, like the poet who had most inspired her, Christina Rosetti, a gift that if it was not genius, certainly resembled it. It was a lyric gift as simple and natural as breathing. It caught one unaware and left the most critical mind astonished and helpless. It was a genuine cry of the heart, the anguish, the ecstacy, that cannot be counterfeited by art alone. For already, in spite of the second-rate literary company she usually kept, she had what Christina Rossetti had, something that placed her among the few women who have written poetry in English—perhaps in any language. She had created a world of her own, personal, lucid, pure, somewhat classical, in the best sense. It was the world in which her spirit lived, and which sustained her very personal gifts. She was entirely uninfluenced in her poetry by any of the so-called "new poets" of the poetry "renaissance" though she knew some of them and liked them personally. The people around her became transfigured into poetry. Her inner world provided an escape from the warm, adoring world of her comfortable family mansion. It transmuted the everyday world in which she lived into a shimmer of cool, glittering imagery and warm, intense feeling. She had the art of drawing a seemingly artless beauty out of the simple things—a walk in Central Park or along Riverside Drive on a windy day; or two lovers occupied only with each other among the splendors of the Metropolitan Museum. These were New York scenes—for like a true Middle Westerner she was restless, and though she loved her native state, she was happiest when away from it. But wherever she went, she brought her native sensibility with her. When she visited Maine, for instance, and described in her earlier Iyrics the cold rain falling, or the spring wind blowing over the awakened lilac trees, it was all like the pictures she and her friends admired at that time. Yet—and the yet is always there—there was a difference. Something pure and fresh belonging to a magical world not on any map is revealed to us. It is an art that cannot be defined, and yet is felt by anyone who cares about poetry. It speaks to the heart. In l905 Sara Teasdale took the first of her frequent trips to Europe. Although her favorite country was always England, she was no Henry James, no T. S. Eliot, nor even a Whistler. She had no aesthetic battles to fight; her universe was within her. Hers was an inner landscape, a traditional world, lit by a radiance that was never seen by land or sea. She could look through the magic lantern of her spirit—and no matter where she happened to be, her Muse, if one may call it that, guided her to that landscape, that scene. There it was, that small del.ghtful vision and its accompanying music. There they are too, the old ought-to-be-banalities as we see them in her sensitive, revealing letters. Through them we can see how she gained the materials for her poetry, never of course how she transmuted it. That was her secret. She likes Murillo's paintings when in Spain, the Alcazar—like a dream from fairyland; in Paris she fell in love with the Venus de Milo, finding that rather hefty goddess "the Goddess of spiritual love." In the Louvre she admired equally Corot and the forgotten Dupres, the latter for reasons that cast light on her poetic inspiration. He had, she thought, a silvery air of revery; something about him gave her the same effect she had found in Shelley's "Alastor." But it was England that moved her the most as always. She loved, as Marianne Moore did, the "baby rivers"; they were so quiet, slow, comfortable looking. "English rivers are too well bred to overflow their banks." Again she rediscovered the Pre-Raphaelites. But, American to the bone, she was glad to be home again. She had enjoyed her travels, they were to yield inspiration. But she had rarely seen anything ugly, sordid, distorted. Her interest was not in Social Realism, her values of another kind. This was her strength and limitation. A kind of divine egocentricity, one might call it. If it limited her poetry, unlike her glamorous contemporary Elinor Wylie, whose love affair with herself can be called one of the great romances of history, Sara Teasdale's personal impressions were recorded with an almost impersonal warmth that spoke for others as well as herself. And yet her inspiration was purely personal, colored by her own vision of the world, her own feelings, her own introspection where she saw herself as in a magic mirror. Then she discovered Duse. Duse had been playing in Paris when Sara Teasdale was there, but it is characteristic that though she admired her she did not go to see her. The cult of Duse had indeed reached rarefied heights (one can only compare it with the cult of Greta Garbo—only a little more so). Amy Lowell, later to be a close friend of Sara Teasdale, shared her adoration; but practical and aggressive, she got to know her idol when Duse visited the United States. With Sara Teasdale such an encounter was not necessary. She read the descriptions of Duse's acting, she saw the photographs. It was enough. She had what she wanted, a subject for a series of poems. Her first book, appearing in l907, was called Sonnets to Duse and Other Poems. Her enthusiasm for Duse and her legend was pure Teasdale, a romantic vision out of which she drew an almost mystical meaning, a symbolic beauty. Though Duse kept her male critics in a trance, her chief adorers were women. Was she not a plain woman who on the stage left an image of extraordinary grace and melancholy charm? Her great lover, D'Annunzio, had been unfaithful and had made her suffer. She suffered beautifully on the stage. It is difficult at this period to know exactly what Duse's gift was. One must consult an intelligent male opinion. The feverish quality of the Duse cult did not pass unnoticed by one of the brightest drama critics of the day—Max Beerbohm. He was not, he confessed, sadly overwhelmed by her personality—or even her acting. He saw power and nobility in her face and "in her little shrill voice," which had a certain charm. He admired her movements, which had both strength and grace. "But my prevailing emotion is hostile to her. I cannot surrender . . . and see in her incarnate womanhood, and the very spirit of the world's tears.... My prevailing impression is that of a great egoistic force, of a woman over-riding with an air of sombre unconcern, plays, mimes, critics and public.... l should admire this tremendous egoism very much indeed. In a woman it makes me uncomfortable. I dislike it. In the name of art, I protest against it." Sara Teasdale's enthusiasm for Duse did not lead to very distinguished poetry. But in these poems she was discovering her tone if not her real voice. That came later, slowly and so luietly that when her gifts had reached their ultimate distinction and even originality, very few of her admirers noticed it. One can say that they listened to the sound of her voice, but never troubled to discover the curious art and music of her song. Her Love Songs, published in 1917, began to show her increasing and individual promise. The Love Songs had their banalities, but she was the kind of poet whose critical processes as far as her own work was concerned flowed on unchecked and unheeded in her unconscious, far beneath the surface of instinctive artistry. She seemed to publish the same poem many times, deepening the tones and textures of her verse. But she remained clearly within her limitations, and her low-pitched variations upon a few themes were so persuasive and sensitive that the few banalities were forgotten, and in fact they almost completely disappear in her later work. For she had the invaluable gift of instinctive taste, a gift that cannot be taught, as music cannot be taught to the tone deaf or color to the color blind. It would be wrong, however, to dismiss Sara Teasdale's early books as merely promising. Already we find many characertistic poems that are still loved and quoted by her admirers, that are anthology favorites to this day. For her admirers though never ostentatious are numerous and staunch, and have managed to pass on their love to a new generation, as the numerous editions of her Collected Poems show! What then is the quality in Sara Teasdale's poems that defies critical silence and current fashion? For as has been said she belonged in practice to an earlier generation and might have fallen into the half oblivion of another excellent and individual poet like Lizette Reese. Yet unlike Lizette Reese she did not quarrel with the new poetry, she simply went her own way, and in at least one branch of it, the group around Harriet Monroe and her magazine, she found friends and admirers, especially among such diverse figures as Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, and Amy Lowell. Clarity, emotional sincerity, technical simplicity that hid her art, and that indefinable something that is true poetry gave her work its strange appeal. There are times when her short lyrics seem as firm as Walter Savage Landor's, although less marmoreal, appealing to the heart rather than the mind. She is intelligent rather than intellectual. Even in her letters one finds an unmawkish sensibility. (These also have a touch of wit and humor lacking in her poems.) On one of her trips abroad with the anthologist Jessie Rittenhouse, she berates Poseidon, after she has been seeing the ocean. "I chid him for not having the elegance and grace of Zeus who gave his lady-love gold instead of a cold shower." Or of Lake Como, "If Lake Como is real, God made it when he was young and exuberant." Or of Isola Bella, "This island is the most unreal thing in the world, exquisite, formal, and as artificial as a French verse form." Europe, as we have seen, was to her a series of clear, colorful pictures seen through a super-magic lantern; it returned to her what she brought—and gave fresh stimulus to the inner vision that made her poems. She even seemed to have preferred New York City to Paris, that Elysium of the Middle-Western expatriate, and to New York she came to live and to die. It was again characteristic of her that one of her first addresses in New York City was the Martha Washington Hotel, then as now known as a hotel exclusively for women. We dare not imagine some of her more glamorous contemporaries, say Edna Millay or Elinor Wylie, choosing such a place to write their love lyrics—even in 1912. The famous Loe Songs (1917) shows the true character of her verse which appears steadily afterward. Even in earlier volumes this true note is heard. New York is there through that inner revery that she brought to all places, and yet it is an individual voice and a real vision. Here is "Central Park at Dusk," from her second book, Helen of Troy (1911): There is no sign of leaf or bud, Some of her later strength and strong rhythm is heard in "I Would Live in Your Love": I would live in your love as the sea-grasses Her invocation of Coney Island from her early book Helen of Troy tells us more of Sara Teasdale and her art than of Coney Island—but it is a haunting poem nevertheless, and is in a vein she continues in later volumes: Why did you bring me here? The wind is like a hand In Rivers to the Sea (1915) we have one of the most perfect of her lyrics, probably one of her most quoted poems, "I Shall Not Care": When I am dead and over me bright April I shall have peace as leafy trees are peaceful Rivers to the Sea also contains the dreamlike beauty of "The Fountain," a descriptive poem of magical imagery and sound, and the Shelleyesque "The Cloud" and the often-anthologized "Leaves." Very interesting too are the light, apparently slight vignettes as seen in her travels. All she sees, all she feels is again drawn in upon herself; we see the scenes drawn from her travels as through a thin veil of introspection; but since the small poems are truly exquisite, we have no right to protest. There is the well-known "Night Song at Amalfi": I asked the heaven of stars And one cannot resist the temptation to quote the "Villa Serbelloni, Bellaggio" because of its blend of classical-romantic limpidity, which reminds us again of a softer Landor. The fountain shivers lightly in the rain, Oh dripping laurel, Phoebus sacred tree, In fact this series of small travel vignettes might have been inscribed on a jeweled music box; they are treasures of their kind. The solid facts of Sara Teasdale's biography bear an unreal relationship to her poetry. In Flame and Shadow (1920) she has become the mistress of a style not without a touch of austere elegance. If the fashionable critics said very little, her public rediscovered her with each volume. Her skill is still effortless; it is as always true art. Each volume contained another of her small masterpieces such as "Let It Be Forgotten" from Flame and Shadow. Let it be forgotten as a flower is forgotten, If anyone asks, say it was forgotten Meanwhile she traveled widely, to Maine, to New Hampshire, to California, to Arizona, moving from one respectable hotel to another. She paid other fleeting visits to England, where she visited Virginia Woolf; she also began to take notes on a biography of Christina Rossetti. Among her closest friends were members of the Poetry Society of America, many of whose names arouse only the faintest echoes now. An honor from the Poetry Society aroused flutters of excitement all around, and she shared its excitements and ceremonies. But in Chicago, as we have seen, she had made the acquaintance and gained the affection of Harriet Monroe, who was editing Poetry Magazine, a magazine that was not hospitable to many of her friends. Through Poetry Magazine she again met Lindsay and Sandburg, whose poetry she admired, whereas the; more esoteric group centered around The Dial (which was to make the fashionable literary reputations of the future) left her uninfluenced. Lindsay became her worshiping admirer, he courted her with extraordinary letters, he dedicated at least one masterpiece to her, the lovely "Chinese Nightingale." She was thinking more and more of Christina Rossetti, whose poetry she had always admired. She had bought a manuscript copy of a letter of Christina to her brother, Dante Gabriel, and of Christina and her poetry she had written, "Her gentle stoicism masked an impassioned heart." Comparing her to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, she wrote, and few will disagree, "Her music is to E.B.B. what Schubert is to a street melody." There was more than a casual resemblance in Sara Teasdale's poems to Christina Rossetti's verse. Sara Teasdale had the same fine ear though not the same degree of subtlety for transmitting a faintly exotic music. Christina Rossetti had greater depths, she had passion where Teasdale had poignancy. Christina Rossetti's theme had been the transfiguration of love into religious devotion. The charm of her poetry is the image it contains of a temperament that suppressed the raptures of Saint Theresa within the restraints of the Anglo-Catholic Church. In many ways she betrayed her unEnglish origins and in none so poignantly as when she disclosed her Latin temperament in the authentic voice of ardent devotion, mystical piety. The experience and emotions of feminine love are enough for Sara Teasdale—that and the mysterious something that she derived from the 1890s, which she called Beauty. Her generation was still fond of invoking it, and it probably meant that she loved whatever was lovable and beautiful in life, the charm of landscape, of nature, of art. Unfortunately her weakest poems are often on this theme. When she invoked Beauty too self-consciously to a generation who had its own ideas about Beauty and did not always identify her with Helen of Troy, Sappho, or the acting of Duse but often rather in out-of-the-way places, she found herself misunderstood. It was in delicately expressing her changing feelings, her own depths and shifting moods that she began to speak with authority and with a Beauty that was more than a name. She never found her "heart's home," to quote a phrase from one of her favorite poems by her friend John Hall Wheelock. The singular beauty she sought could not be found in this world. As has been noticed, when she married, her marriage was not to the too ardent Lindsay, who had courted her with fantastic letters, with beautiful exuberance, but to a prosperous businessman, Ernst Filsinger (also with St. Louis connections), who might have stepped out as escort to any of the frieze of young girls she had known in her youth. Those who met him (among her literary friends) described him as foreign-looking, melancholy, vaguely literary, widely read, looking "like a diplomat on a secret mission." Louis Untermeyer described him more unkindly as looking "like the head usher of a funeral parlor." The fact was that he was probably not at ease in her New York literary circles. He had cause for melancholy. Sara Teasdale was extraordinarily virginal, one might say spinsterish. She found the realities of marriage diflicult; she was certainly not a domestic type. He might as well have married the Fata Morgana, Undine, or La Belle Dame Sans Merci. To him Sara Teasdale seemed the Muse of Poetry; she was also a well-bred woman of his own kind, a Sappho perhaps, but a Sappho in modest draperies. The marriage was not a success and they were divorced in l929. She might have listened to Lindsay, who had once exhorted her, "Let us think upon the stars and save our hearts from every desire but the desire of song." Eventually she was left alone with her consuming gift of song. Did she not write of herself that she was "self-complete as a flower or a stone"? Her gifts deepened, she was herself again, only more so. In Dark of the Moon ( 1926), one of her finest books, one begins to discover her rarity. It is really possible to think of it as one thinks of Jane Austen's last novel, Persuasion—its subtle sadness, its subtle difference to what has gone before, its preoccupation with autumn, with change, with darkening perceptions. The critics were too occupied with new names, new theories of poetry to notice this. Her loyal public took it all in stride; they liked everything she had written. Her horizons expanded, she spoke for a larger world than in her earlier works. Her autumn poems in the section entitled "Pictures of Autumn" are truly exquisite. Witter Bynner, one of her friends, speaks of her "true seeing sadness." The music of flowers, of waves, and the sea continues; she lends music and magic to places she has visited, the sand dunes of Maine, or Riverside Drive again on a lonely rainy day. Again she visited Europe, the autumnal mood followed her. In the Parc Monceau in Paris she remembers only the yellow leaves falling, and a marble Venus. Again we have her peculiar classicism, personal and chaste: Is she pointing to her breasts or trying to hide them? The colonnade curves close to the leaf-strewn water She betrays something of her inner world in "Midsummer Night": When I have said "This tragic farce I play in A young girl, Margaret Conklin, a student at Connecticut College for Women, wrote to her and became a close friend, a source of real comfort and warmth in her later years. The breakup of her marriage, her continued preoccupation with her ill health, her dwindling income during the years of the Great Depression increased her melancholy. Vachel Lindsay died under tragic circumstances, and she felt his death keenly. He was closer to her than she knew. In the summer of 1932 she made a last trip to her beloved England, where she visited the shrines made sacred by Christina Rossetti. On an earlier trip to England with Miss Conklin, she wrote "To a Child Watching the Gulls," from Strange Victory (1933). The plea she makes is so poignant and deep that it might stand as her last word on her last poems. She speaks of the painted light reflected on the sea gulls' wings, its mysterious vanishing beauty. She then addresses the young friend who watches with her. You who are young, O you who will outlive me, She had surpassed herself in Dark of the Moon and Stange Victory—her last book. The few who associated her with the coterie of minor poets and poetesses of the club-woman variety began vaguely—but still vaguely—to see that she was like nobody else, a poet of rare distinction. Her poetry had no wit, no dazzling technical innovations. The rising academic quarterlies would have had difficulty analyzing her. She seemed to have no social message. But she has outlived many more fashionable and showier reputations. She endures because she was, is unique. Sara Teasdale died January 29, 1933, from an overdose of sleeping pills. It was not, it was thought, an accident. Perhaps she had said all she had to say. Having achieved her "Strange Victory," she left it for posterity to interpret. In "Moon's Ending," one of her last poems, we have her epitaph: Moon, worn thin to the width of a quill,
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