Sara Teasdale

“It would be nice to think that this comprehensive and thought provoking biography will do something to give Teasdale a permanent, if small, niche in the history of American poetry. She is a good poet, if not a great one—much better than her splashy contemporaries Vachel Lindsay and Carl Sandburg. … Teasdale herself could not have wished for a better biographer than William Drake.”—Katha Pollitt, The New York Times Book Review

“William Drake’s biography of Sara Teasdale is a sensitive, readable, intelligent perspective on a poet whose work influenced writers like John Berryman, Louise Bogan, and Sylvia Plath. Drake approaches his subject with candor and provides a very useful background in terms of attitudes toward woman poets during the 1910s and 1920s, illuminating the American poetic scene in wonderful new ways.”—Cheryl Walker

“This is a profoundly moving biography of one of America’s foremost lyric poets and women artists.”—Rita Ingram Givens, San Francisco Examiner

Sara Teasdale was the best-loved poet in America in the 1920s. Today most people know little of her poetry beyond some highly popular early sentimental verse; they know even less about the poet herself. Now William Drake restores to American letters the unique contribution of Sara Teasdale, whose poetic craft and frequently tortured life interacted in important ways.