SOURCE: “Sara Teasdale's Last Poems,” in New Republic, Vol. 77, November 15, 1933, p. 25.

In the following laudatory assessment of Strange Victory, Bogan deems the collection “the final expression of a purely lyrical talent and of a poetic career remarkable for its integrity throughout.”

Lyric poetry, however deeply felt and felicitously contrived, nowadays falls dangerously near the line dividing the romantic nostalgia and mock heroics of the nineteenth century from more complicated and turbulent contemporary writing. The taste which cherished the simple lyric cry of grief, ecstasy or regret written into a sonnet or a series of quatrains has given way; modern ears demand a more complicated stimulus. It is practically impossible for a poet to express simply and without apology or blague direct emotion concerning his own passions and his intimations of the universe at large. The human heart would seem to be outmoded; the eye of eternity has become...