Sara Teasdale’s biography, net worth, fact, career, awards and life story

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

Biography

Teasdale was born on August 8, 1884. She had such poor health for so much of her childhood, home schooled until age 9, that it was only at age 10 that she was well enough to begin school. She started at Mary Institute in 1898, but switched to Hosmer Hall in 1899, graduating in 1903. The Teasdale family resided at 3668 Lindell Blvd. and then 38 Kingsbury Place in St. Louis, Missouri. Both homes were designed by Sara’s mother. The house on Kingsbury Place had a private suite for Sara on the second floor. Guests entered through a separate entrance and were admitted by appointment. This suite is where Sara worked, slept, and often dined alone.

Teasdale’s first poem was published in William Marion Reedy’s 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, 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.

From 1911 to 1914 Teasdale was courted by several men, including the poet Vachel Lindsay, who was truly in love with her but did not feel that he could provide enough money or stability to keep her satisfied. She chose to marry Ernst Filsinger, a longtime admirer of her poetry, on December 19, 1914.

Teasdale’s third poetry collection, Rivers to the Sea, was published in 1915. It was and is a bestseller, being reprinted several times. In 1916 she and Filsinger moved to New York City, where they lived in an Upper West Side apartment on Central Park West.

In 1918 she won a Pulitzer Prize for her 1917 poetry collection Love Songs. It was “made possible by a special grant from The Poetry Society”; however, the sponsoring organization now lists it as the earliest Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (inaugurated 1922).

Filsinger’s constant business travel caused Teasdale much loneliness. In 1929, she moved interstate for three months, thereby satisfying the criteria to gain a divorce. She did not wish to inform Filsinger, only doing so at her lawyers’ insistence as the divorce was going through. Filsinger was shocked. After the divorce she moved only two blocks from her old home on Central Park West. She rekindled her friendship with Vachel Lindsay, who was now married with children.

In 1933, she died by suicide, overdosing on sleeping pills. Lindsay had died by suicide two years earlier. She is interred in Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis.

Teasdale’s suicide and “I Shall Not Care”

A common urban legend surrounds Teasdale’s suicide. The poem “I Shall Not Care” was speculated to be her suicide note because of its depressing undertone. 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.

•  Rivers to the Sea. MACMILLAN & CO. Wikisource. 1919. 

Legacy and influence

• 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.
• Teasdale is the favorite poet of Arlington LeGrande, the main character of Jacquelyn Mitchard’s novel The Most Wanted.
• Teasdale’s poem “Stars” was set as a choral piece by Eriks Esenvalds, a Latvian Composer, for Musica Baltica. It has become widely known for its use of crystal glasses for a soothing sound of the ‘stars’.
• 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.
• In 2011, the composer Joseph Phibbs chose poems by Teasdale for his song-cycle From Shore to Shore, and the song Pierrot, and in 2013-14 he returned to her texts for his six Moon Songs. He has also acknowledged her influence in his orchestral work Rivers to the Sea.
• In 2015, eleven poems of Teasdale’s Flame and Shadow collection were put to music by the band Scarecrow.
• In 2015, Daniel Elder arranged a piece titled Fresh and Fearless, based on Teasdale’s poem May Night. It was commissioned for, and premiered by, The University of Akron Concert Choir.
• In 2016, an SATB choral setting of Teasdale’s poem Alchemy composed by Robert Anthony LaRose was premiered by the Choir of the College of William and Mary.

• https://www.musicabaltica.com/en/composers-and-authors/eriks-esenvalds/
• St. Louis Walk of Fame. “St. Louis Walk of Fame Inductees”. stlouiswalkoffame.org. Retrieved 25 April 2013. 
• James Boyd, guitar with Michael Chance, counter-tenor, in recording “Joseph Phibbs – The Canticle of the Rose“, NMC Debut Discs D191. Notes include composer’s commentary. Published by Ricordi.
• Premiere: Lesley-Jane Rogers, John Turner, Janet Simpson in ‘Antony Hopkins: A Portrait’, Divine Art DDA21217. Published by Ricordi.
• Performed by Lesley-Jane Rogers, soprano, Carole Nash Room, Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester, 26 October 2014, (Lesley Jane Rogers), and with members of the Dr K. Sextet, ‘Pierrot Kabarett’ Concert, Club Inegales, Gower Street, London, 22 January 2015 (Dr K. Sextet).
• Premiere: The Anvil, Basingstoke, 22 June 2012. London Premiere: Philharmonia Orchestra cond. Esa-Pekka Salonen, Royal Festival Hall, 28 June 2012. Interview: ‘Joseph Phibbs: Rivers to the Sea (New Commission)’, Philharmonia Orchestra video, 2012, Vimeo. Listing/Review: Douglas Cooksey, ‘Philharmonia Orchestra/Esa-Pekka Salonen at Royal Festival Hall – Phibbs’s Rivers to the Sea & Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony’, Classical Source. Published by Ricordi.
• “Daniel Elder – Welcome”. Daniel Elder Music. Retrieved 2017-01-24. 
• https://events.wm.edu/event/view/music/58000

Translations

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