Teasdale, Sara - Babette Deutsch (review date 1937)
Babette Deutsch (review date 1937)
SOURCE: “The Solitary Ironist,” in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, Vol. 51, December 12, 1937, pp. 148-53.
[In the following review, Deutsch offers a mixed assessment of Teasdale's Collected Poems.]
About the time that Masefield was trying to bring the Chaucerian plainness of speech back to English verse, and a bright-haired young man from Idaho was transposing Provençal music in a fashion startling to English ears, Sara Teasdale published the poems with which this book [The Collected Poems of Sara Teasdale] commences. They touched on recognized themes in the recognized way, they had nothing rough or foreign about them, and they possessed, beyond their pleasant familiarity, a fluent melodiousness.
The keynote is struck in the opening sonnet to Eleanora Duse: “Oh beauty that is filled so full of tears.” Beauty and sorrow; love, happy or crossed; death, shrunk from as the end of...
[The entire page is 1498 words long]
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