In her later years, however, and in her best work, she extended her range in philosophical depth and self-examination.
After her death in 1933, Teasdale's work gradually disappeared from anthologies, textbooks, and the concern of academic critics. Her popularity with nonacademic readers nevertheless continued, The Collected Poems (1937) going through more than twenty printings before being republished in paperback in 1966. With the rise of women's studies and feminist criticism in the 1970s, Teasdale's work emerged in a new light. Although Sara Teasdale thought of her poetry as continuing in a tradition of nineteenth-century women's verse, particularly that of Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, she outgrew the conventional Victorian attitudes of her early work to probe in maturity the personal conflicts she experienced as revolutionary changes swept twentieth-century society. Women were thrown to the forefront of those changes, with both greater freedom and the heavier, sometimes confusing, demands placed upon them. Sara Teasdale, however, was not a heroine of the new age as much as its victim, and her later work reflects the cost exacted by disillusion in romantic love, a failed marriage, an abortion, divorce, striving for professional prominence, and eventual loneliness and suicide.
Sara Teasdale was the late-arriving and youngest child of John Warren Teasdale, a prosperous St.
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