[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 love and beauty, or desired as the peace they cannot give—these are the recurrent motifs. A girlish wistfulness is the distinguishing feature of the early lyrics. They have the charm of Heine's Lieder, without his sharpness, the poignancy of Housman's songs, without his bitterness. They are personal, without having the vice of privacy or the virtue of subtlety, honest but not profound. The properties are bread and wine, swords and viols; the settings are gardens, shrines and palaces; the characters: pilgrims, shepherds, knights, and kings and queens. Even where the poems bear titles that evoke common scenes—Union Square, Coney Island, Gramercy Park, the Metropolitan Museum—these are merely the background for a moment of sentimental drama or traditional romance. But always there is the subdued melody that redeems the easy imagery and the trite situation. Some have the Elizabethan grace of the lyric that ends

When thou art more cruel than he,
Then will Love be kind to thee.

Others strike the note that Edna Millay was to sound more vibrantly for a more deeply disillusioned generation:

I hoped that he would love me,
          And he has kissed my mouth,
But I am like a stricken bird
          That cannot reach the south.
For though I know he loves me,
          Tonight my heart is sad;
His kiss was not so wonderful
          As all the dreams I had.

Repeatedly there is the slight ironic touch at the close, which, though the irony is gentle and all too feminine, is an index to a discriminating sensibility.

The chief faults of Miss Teasdale's work are the monotony of her matter and the explicitness of her statements. Often vague where she should have been precise, as in the delineation of background, she was apt to be overly exact where she should have been reticent, as in defining the nature of the grief that troubled or the joy that exalted her. It is almost incredible that the poet who was to write the lyrics in Flame and Shadow, and more particularly those in Dark of the Moon, the woman who was to become “self-complete as a flower or a stone,” should have been capable of the banality of lines like “I love, I am loved, he is mine” or “And when I am with you, I am at rest.”

The fascination of this volume lies in the fact that it exhibits so clearly the poet's development. As the years went by, the themes did not alter much, but the cadences became more varied, the mood more reflective, the expression more sensitive. Gradually, the irony that pointed the best of the early lyrics deepened and strengthened the poetry of Miss Teasdale's maturity. She was moved by the same things, rejoiced by the same natural beauties, overcome by the same loneliness, haunted by the same recurrent terror. But the personal relation is realized with a keener sense of the nuances of human intercourse, the terror is measured by a fuller awareness of man's fate, even the landscapes are viewed with a more perceptive eye. With these sharpened responses to the world about and the world within, came also a better control of her instrument. The later poems do not require, as so many of the early ones seem to do, the accompaniment of voice and strings in order to give them a suggestiveness that they fail to achieve. The riper pieces are, as their author came to be, self-sufficient. It is no strange and bitter brew that Miss Teasdale offers—it is the wine that one expects with dinner in a civilized place. But with the years, one finds that the bouquet is finer and the flavor delightfully dry.

Aware, as every sensitive person must be, of the cruelties that beset mankind, Miss Teasdale scarcely ever touched upon the problems that are the subject of current poetry. This is brought home to the reader with sardonic force by the line, written, it is true, before the advent of fascism: “Oh when God made Italy He was gay and young.” Her nearest approach to the Social Muse was in an early sentimental piece lamenting the lot of

                    the girls who ask for love
In the lights of Union Square,

and in a later sonnet where she speaks of standing at night before the window confronting the brilliant city, and being visited by a “stark

Sense of the lives behind each yellow light,
And not one wholly joyous, proud or free.”

Even the poems written during the war show a signal ignorance of, if not quite aloofness from, the misery that eats the lives of the mass of humanity. Herself “not wholly joyous, proud or free,” the circumstances of Sara Teasdale's life were yet sufficiently happy to enable her to savor the pleasures of travel and music, books and people, without too painful a realization of the disease infecting the society of which she was a part. It belongs, however, to a cultivated intelligence to appreciate the evils of existence as well as the gifts of fortune. But the later work, though it continues to be personal, harps upon a complaint so common to mankind as to raise the poetry to the level of the impersonal. There are still love poems that dwell upon the solace that perfect comradeship alone can give. The bulk of the later work, however, expresses an autumnal wisdom, or a craving for release from the burden of loneliness, the grief of lessening powers, the inevitable pain of living.

The poet of passion is the tender individualist, but when love's fulfillment is past, she can, if she is wise, find the sure refuge of the solitary in her own integrity. The recognition of her self-dependence finds contented expression in the lyric which opens her last and finest volume, where she confesses:

It was not you, though you were near,
          Though you were good to hear and see,
It was not earth, it was not heaven,
          It was myself that sang in me.

It is expressed with a sombre resonance in not a few other poems of the same collection, most forthrightly perhaps in “Day's Ending”:

Aloof as aged kings,
Wearing like them the purple,
The mountains ring the mesa
Crowned with a dusky light;
Many a time I watched
That coming-on of darkness
Till stars burned through the heavens
Intolerably bright.
It was not long I lived there
But I became a woman
Under those vehement stars,
For it was there I heard
For the first time my spirit
Forging an iron rule for me,
As though with slow cold hammers
Beating out word by word:
“Only yourself can heal you,
Only yourself can lead you,
The road is heavy going
And ends where no man knows;
Take love when love is given,
But never think to find it
A sure escape from sorrow
Or a complete repose.”

The sole complete repose is death. The one escape would seem to be in the occupations named in “Leisure”:

The year will turn for me, I shall delight in
          All animals, and some of my own kind,
Sharing with no one but myself the frosty
          And half ironic musings of my mind.

Here, plainly, is no revolutionary, in any sense of the word. The technique is traditional. The prevailing temper is one of acceptance—joyous, mournful, or resigned. But though Sara Teasdale's scope was limited, it enlarged with the years, so that her mature work delights one with its deeper music and frosty beauty. Even the longed-for achievement of the good society will not appreciably lessen private griefs. While these remain, one can find some assuagement in the melody of such lyrics as these, and take courage from their quiet irony.