Sara Teasdale Critical Essay | Excerpt by Louis Untermeyer

Excerpt by Louis Untermeyer

SOURCE: “Sara Teasdale,” in American Poetry since 1900, Henry Holt, 1923, pp. 206-14.

In the following excerpt, Untermeyer offers a brief survey of Teasdale's verse.

None of the word-musicians has more completely and melodiously mastered her craft than Sara Teasdale. With the utmost simplicity of phrase and style, she achieves effects that are little short of magical; her stanzas, often without a single figure of speech, are more eloquent than a poem crammed with tropes and highly spiced similes. This personal utterance which, as Miss Teasdale's schooling has proceeded, has grown less and less studied, is already recognizable among many echoes in the early Sonnets to Duse and Other Poems. But in Helen of Troy and Other Poems it is far stronger. And yet, excellent as are many of the short poems, Miss Teasdale has not attained her full singing power in this volume; her songs are surpassed by the...
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