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Sara Teasdale |
Sara Teasdale was never a well child. She grew up in a wealthy St. Louis family with a nurse in constant attendance. She recovered enough to begin publishing her poetry in 1907, and in 1914 she married a prosperous businessman who could continue the care to which she was accustomed. They moved to New York and four years later she won what is now the Pulitzer Prize.
Yet the solitary sadness so evident in her poetry must have been there in her life as well. She divorced her husband in 1929 and went to England to begin a biography of Christina Rossetti. But she fell ill again, came home, and never fully recovered. A nervous condition blocked her writing and left her lying awake night after night until she finally got into a warm bath, took an overdose of barbiturates, and went to sleep.
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Immortal Poets: Their Lives and Verse, by Christopher Burns |