If Amy Lowell is rarely read these days, Sara Teasdale is practically forgotten. Routinely excluded from anthologies of American literature, her work doesn’t even appear in Gilbert and Gubar's Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. It is usually assumed that her poetry, suggestive but chaste in its diction, containing no obscure or arcane language, and absolutely without intellectual complexity or challenge, is better suited to the young girl's romantic calendar with its daily quotation than to assemblages of modernist poets such as Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams. Studies of American culture in the first two decades of this century usually feel they can afford to ignore Sara Teasdale entirely.

Few people now remember that John Berryman had great respect for the dark lyrics Teasdale wrote at the end of her life, or that Sylvia Plath was more than a little influenced by Teasdale's work, or that Louise Bogan—whose work often receives the academic respect refused to Teasdale—made dramatic use of Teasdale's poetry in her own small and carefully edited opus. It has fallen to William Drake, almost alone among contemporary scholars, to give Sara Teasdale the respectful scholarly attention denied her by others. His feminist appreciation of the poet does not overlook the weaknesses in her poems but reminds us that her classic lyrical strengths, reminiscent of Sappho's and Christina Rossetti's, give her poetry a certain staying power in spite of its limitations. In fact, Teasdale's Collected Poems remained in print until the mid-seventies.¹

In our fascination with modernism's pursuit of novelty and intellectual challenge, we tend to overlook the fact that Sara Teasdale was a revolutionary in her own time. True, she was a quiet revolutionary, but she broke new ground for women poets in her particular devotion to what she called “song”: a musical poetry based on directness, simplicity, and emotional intensity for which the main model was Sappho. Her first major book, Helen of Troy and Other Poems, was published in 1911, before the advent of Edna St. Vincent Millay or H. D., and her particular brand of feminine verse would influence not only Millay but Amy Lowell, Elinor Wylie, and Louise Bogan.

After Teasdale's appearance, it became fashionable for women poets to write poems like hers with short lines of three or four stresses. In fact, the movement away from iambic pentameter in women's poems had begun earlier with the poetesses, with Emily Dickinson and Lizette Woodworth Reese. The ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge and the later lyrics of A. E. Housman and Thomas Hardy had established the legitimacy within a male tradition of rendering feeling, especially sorrow, in language meant to juxtapose human and natural settings. They too had defied the domination of iambic pentameter. But for women like Teasdale, the language of song was apt to express not only a vision of life controlled by the eternal cycles of birth and death, love and pain, but also the experiences of women speaking, as Carol Gilligan suggests, “in a different voice.”²

Teasdale's narrow lyrics were principally concerned with emotional life, often with love. Unlike Dickinson and certainly unlike Amy Lowell, Teasdale was seemingly content to mine the territory traditionally conceded to women, what Louise Bogan calls “the line of feeling.” In Teasdale's wake a series of women poets followed her pattern of lucid exposition, at times ironic but always intimate in its address to the reader, a poetic practice producing a feminine voice recognized as such and applauded by its generation. As Drake says: “Reviewers found the feminine point of view in her work to be one of its chief points of interest—a revelation of women's emotion.”³ Though the development and proliferation of this kind of poetry cannot be traced entirely to Teasdale, her presence on the literary scene was more influential than is generally recognized. Poets like Aline Kilmer, Hilda and Grace Conkling, Jean Starr Untermeyer, Dorothy Parker, Leonora Speyer, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, and Nathalia Crane emerged in the teens and twenties with “songs” of their own.

To her generation, Teasdale's work was “modern” in the sense that it was virtually stripped of verbal posturing. Though it often relied on metaphors drawn from nature, it epitomized the modern passion for colloquialism and straightforwardness. Beyond this, Sara Teasdale's work represented a tension of considerable interest to her generation and of continuing interest to ours: the modern problem of feminine identity-formation. Put another way, we might describe this as the problem of balancing autonomy with affiliation, freedom with love.

Even Teasdale's verse forms suggest this tension. In her choice of conversational, seemingly spontaneous diction, she appeared to be a free spirit, unconstrained by the affectations of the past. Her poems seem to say, “I am willing to go my own way even at the risk of appearing naive, undereducated, or slight.” Though always modest, this poetry was in its own way an indictment of an English tradition which valorized philosophical renderings of “universal” human problems all the while coopting female voices in what Toril Moi has called “the ventriloquism of patriarchy.”⁴

However, Teasdale refused the freedoms so ardently proposed by a certain branch of modernism. She was committed to a disciplined art giving full credit to the benefits of traditional meters and rhyme schemes. Like so many modern poets in the nightingale tradition, she admired Sappho, Swinburne, and Yeats. To her their legacy seemed to imply that passion must be restrained and tempered by the discipline of measured cadence, a careful balance between music and silence. Otherwise, it remained mere sentimental indulgence. From this standpoint, her respect for the past was greater than her immersion in the present.

If her verse forms embodied a tension between two commitments—one to independence and the other to conventional proprieties—her themes were even more clearly concerned with the need to balance self-indulgence and self-restraint. In this she captured an undercurrent of her historical moment, in which progressivism struggled with an older Victorianism advocating caution and propriety. One can see these clashing forces represented by the way that women before the First World War were both encouraged to be independent and reminded not to forget their duties. Furthermore, the social revolution of the teens and twenties promised women hitherto unknown opportunities for freedom and self-development while at the same time preserving in its insistence on a romantic love plot many of the assumptions about femininity which had proven so detrimental to women in the past. For women like Sara Teasdale, female identity-formation was likely to be a process fraught with difficulties.

In her choice of the passionate virgin as her most characteristic persona, we can see Teasdale's desire to retain a measure of independence while at the same time insisting upon the importance of living with intensity. By exploring the evolution of Teasdale's persona, we confront more clearly the contradictions of a cultural moment in which the discourses of romantic thralldom and those of feminism both overlapped and converged.⁵

THE PERSONA OF THE PASSIONATE VIRGIN

What is meant by speaking of the passionate virgin as Teasdale's most characteristic persona? Let’s begin with the passionate side. As early as her first poems, she identified herself with women like Eleanora Duse, Helen of Troy, and Guinevere, who were notorious for their sexual adventures. Furthermore, her poems about these women do not underplay the power of erotic longing in the dramas of their lives. Duse is epitomized by her lips, upon which hovers the shadow of a kiss. Helen chooses life over death because the dead presumably have no love “to lift their breasts with longing” (10). Guinevere's surrender to Lancelot is recounted as a moment of passion in the garden.

Quickly he came behind me, caught my arms,
That ached beneath his touch; and then I swayed,
My head fell backward and I saw his face.

(18)

One could as easily point to the numerous shorter poems in which the speaker remembers her lover's kiss as the essential, transforming experience, poems like “The Wanderer” and “The Kiss.” Surely what the poet implies by her use of the kiss is the larger realm of adult sexuality for which the kiss is a synecdoche. This adult passion does make an appearance. In “After Parting,” the poet writes:

I set my shadow in his sight
          And I have winged it with desire,
That it may be a cloud by day
          And in the night a shaft of fire.

(56)

For a virginal poet this is pretty explicit, the only peculiarity being that her shadow rather than his will become the “shaft of fire.”

In this peculiarity, however, lies a clue to Teasdale's virginal sensibility. Rarely are her poems concerned with triumphant sensuality unimpeded by the need for psychological distancing or displacement. Just as in “After Parting,” where the lovers are no longer together and the speaker must rely on a “shadow” self whose activity is doubly displaced as both masculine and imaginary, so the feminine voice of Teasdale's most typical lyrics is a voice of inhibited longing.⁶

Duse, Helen, and Guinevere are resonant for Teasdale because of their experiences of tragic loss. Beatrice, in another of these early heroine poems, feels remorse for her inability to reach out to Dante. Marianna Alcoforando, the Portuguese nun, finds “lack of love is bitterest of all” (15), and Erinna concludes that she is consecrated to Death, not Love, in the end. All of these women find their lives defined by lack, the very lack embodied in the virgin as a figure who points to a sexual status yet to be achieved. They might be called the expressions of a passionate virgin in the sense that what the poet seems to be interested in is the way their isolated sensibilities mull over the experience of loss or lack in private. Passion most frequently belongs to a temporal or spatial otherness.

The emphasis on lack, however, must be distinguished from a Freudian theory of penis envy and from a Lacanian theory of the Phallus. In Freud the female sense of lack is construed as a covert search for power that can never be fully satisfied since the female can never possess the phallus directly but only through her relations with the male as son or lover. In Lacan the experience of lack defines the human condition since every child comes to consciousness through the experience of differentiation, which is felt as loss.⁷

Though women poets may be read as inscribing the psychic in their preoccupation with lack, such readings must also take account of the intersection of the psychic with the social and cultural. In Sara Teasdale, for instance, we should not neglect the specific cultural power women in the nightingale tradition achieved by exploiting the discourse of frustration in order to achieve a representative voice.⁸ Freudian theories leave out of account the way women form bonds with other women (as readers and writers) through their interventions in the cultural conversation. Furthermore, Lacan's universalizing tendency to see all human experience as defined by lack may result in blindness regarding the specific historical positions women occupy when facing the patriarchal Symbolic. In this chapter I will suggest both the resources and power Teasdale found in the persona of the passionate virgin and the inadequacy of this cultural construct as a mode of cultural transformation.

Teasdale repeatedly suggests that within the Feminine, inhibited longing has a ritualized significance. For instance, in “A Maiden” the persona cannot sing to her love but must instead pass him “with downcast eyes.”

And since I am a maiden
          My love will never know
That I could kiss him with a mouth
          More red than roses blow.

(24)

In “Union Square” she envies the prostitutes, who may ask openly for “love.” “Central Park at Dusk” reads in the signature of springtime the muted voice of feminine inhibitions: “A such is over everything—/ Silent as women wait for love” (32).

Indeed, silence, in poems too numerous to recount, operates as the double-voiced discourse of feminine desire. Like the silent beauty of an Eleanora Duse, “its longing unappeased through all the years,” silence is expressive and full. In “February” the speaker says: “My lips kept silent guard / On all I could not say” (57); in “Night Song for Amalfi” the speaker finds in silence the meaning of nature's restraint but wonders if she can give her lover silence her whole life long.

Wisdom, for the poet, typically means learning the iron rule of not voicing her needs. In the late poem “Wisdom,” from Strange Victory (1933), she begins, “Oh to relinquish, with no more sound / Than the bent bough's when the bright apples fall;” her music will be “A paean like the cymbals of the foam, / Or silence, level, spacious, without end” (205).

However, “This is my music,” the poet says, made “for my need.” Thus, it is not a pure renunciation of desire; in its discipline and dignity it offers the speaker a measure of power over circumstance. Furthermore, it connects the poet with other women poets like Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti, who have made of silence a resonant theme.

Did Sara Teasdale read the American women poets of the nineteenth century? She certainly knew some of Emily Dickinson and like Dickinson her spirit was torn between pagan and Puritan impulses, both intense. “The Inn of Earth” seems almost a conscious rewriting of two works by Dickinson, #115 and #1406. The first, “What Inn is this,” she might well have known from its publication in the 1891 Poems, though the second was probably not available to her. In Teasdale's version a story is told of a traveler coming into the inn and asking first for bread and then for sleeping accommodations. At each request the Host goes by “with averted eye” and will not respond to her requests. Finally, she says:

“Since there is neither food nor rest,
          I go where I fared before”—
But the Host went by with averted eye
          And barred the door.

(64)

Elsewhere, Teasdale's rendering of hunger as simultaneously painful and precious is certainly reminiscent of what Barbara Mossberg calls Dickinson's “aesthetics of anorexia.”⁹

Similarly, Teasdale's poem “Desert Pools” reminds one of a nineteenth-century predecessor, this time Maria Brooks. Having concluded that she is “too generous a giver,” Teasdale's speaker imagines her lover will turn to desert places in order to escape the intensity of a demanding female presence.

And there at midnight sick with faring,
          He will stoop down in his desire
To slake the thirst grown past all bearing
          In stagnant water keen as fire.

(55)

The Books poem, first published in Zóphiël; or the Bride of Seven (1833), also contains the desert landscape and the irrepressible thirst, but for Brooks the drinker is female and the obstacle is the lack of a congenial soul.

So many a soul, o’er life's drear desert faring,
          Love's pure, congenial spring unfound, unquaffed,
Suffers, recoils—then thirsty and despairing
          Of what it would, descends and sips the nearest draught.(10)

For both Teasdale and her nineteenth-century predecessors, frustration is a fundamental theme. Dickinson found satisfaction in verbal strategies of subversion. Teasdale, like Wylie and Bogan, advocated mental discipline and the conservation of personal resources at the expense of broader sympathies. Despite these differences, however, the mask of the passionate virgin was appealing to all of these women and resulted in many poems in praise of chastity.

The significant point to be made in Teasdale's case is that in spite of the considerable historical changes in women's social opportunities, her rendering of women's experience and her elucidation of what constitutes “wisdom”—a word widely used in her poems—is an extension of the nightingale tradition she thought herself beyond. The best way to assess Teasdale's position with regard to that tradition is to read her introductions to The Answering Voice.¹¹

In the late teens her publisher asked her to edit a collection of women's love lyrics. The first edition appeared in 1917 and was revised and enlarged ten years later. This collection embodies the contradictions of her cultural moment, for it purports to illustrate the greater freedoms of contemporary women while it reinforces a connection between women and romance not far from Lydia Sigourney's (and Wordsworth's) notion that the soul of woman lives in love. Furthermore, the collection valorizes the relation between women's experience of love and frustration or loss. That Teasdale's formula had considerable staying power may be seen in the fact that this collection was still selling well in 1935.

Though The Answering Voice shows only limited knowledge of women's poetry of the more distant past, the second edition does reveal Teasdale's attitude toward the position of the contemporary woman poet. She says:

Though the passion called love has not changed appreciably during recorded time, our ideas about it have changed constantly, and sometimes with great rapidity. The immediate cause of the new attitude can be traced to the growing economic independence of women consequent on education, and to the universal tendency to rationalize all emotion.

Teasdale contrasts the nineteenth-century love poems with their twentieth-century counterparts. Total absorption in the lover is gone.

One finds little, too, of the pathetic despair so often present in the earlier work. To-day there is stated over and over, perhaps a little overstated, the woman's fearlessness, her love of change, her almost cruelly analytical attitude. The strident or flippant notes that occasionally mar the poems, arise from overstating new ideas, a habit that seems unavoidable until through long possession they have become unselfconscious. This is a period of transition. The perfect balance between the heart and the mind, the body and the spirit, is still to be attained.

Teasdale herself experimented with a modern stance toward love, and in “Four Winds,” “New Love and Old,” and “Winter Night Song” she expresses cynicism or cruelty toward the lover. But her passionate quest was to find that balance between the heart and the mind, the body and the spirit, love and freedom which her contemporary situation did not, in fact, help her to achieve.

Dwelling repeatedly upon these themes, Sara Teasdale found herself looking back to Christina Rossetti, another passionate virgin, for a sense of direction. At her death Teasdale had completed forty pages of a biography of Rossetti that indicated no particular struggle with a strong precursor such as we find in Amy Lowell. William Drake says that her research brought her face to face with many of her own problems, especially “the chain of cause and effect that created the pattern of a life, for she could see clearly how one's supposedly free acts created constantly narrowing limits for the future, imprisoning the will by degrees.”¹²

Teasdale ascribes to Rossetti many of her own feelings, including a dislike of doing housework. Concerning marriage she wrote: “I feel [Rossetti's] disinclination to marry [Cayley] sprang chiefly from her disinclination to marriage in general. She wished to be free to follow her own thoughts, to meditate in her own way. She was a born celibate in spite of her impassioned heart.”¹³ Like Teasdale herself, Rossetti appears in the guise of the passionate virgin.

Much of this material urges us to place Sara Teasdale more firmly in a Victorian nightingale setting than in a modern one. Yet we must not forget that in her day she was an extremely popular poet, whose manipulation of the persona of the passionate virgin gained her a large readership among young women who were themselves uncertain about their role in twentieth-century culture. For them, the passionate virgin seemed to mediate between frustration and fulfillment, silence and voice, marginality and centrality. If we, as late twentieth-century readers, read evidence of continuing oppression in this voice, we must remember that, in an era hardly ready to commit itself to full liberation for women, her ambivalence was widely shared.

THE PARADOXICAL MESSAGE OF “FLAMING YOUTH”

What exactly were young women of this generation finding in the work of Sara Teasdale? My mother, born in 1906, imitated Teasdale in the poetry she published in the Chicago Tribune.¹⁴ She admired the delicate passion in these poems. For many members of her generation, poetry was as natural an expression of youthful desires and torments as popular music is today. The women like my mother who wrote such lyrics did not read much nineteenth-century verse by women but they did read Teasdale, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Elinor Wylie.

One of the reasons they wrote was that they felt their experiences were fresh. Growing up in the postwar world of the late teens and twenties, they saw their position in American culture as unprecedented. As Paula Fass puts it: “In the 1920s, youth appeared suddenly, dramatically, even menacingly on the social scene. Contemporaries quite rightly felt that their presence signalled a social transformation of major proportions.”¹⁵

In many ways, the site of greatest social change was middle-class female behavior among the young. But the flapper image so frequently presented as the emblem of the new American woman was mostly a style rather than a stable conception of identity. The fact that “these modern women” smoked in public, bobbed their hair, stayed out late, and flaunted a kind of hoyden sexuality was less important to the genuine transformation of social norms than it seemed at the time. “Feminist New-Style,” as Dorothy Bromley called her in an often-quoted 1927 article, might “have given as few hostages to Fate as it is humanly possible to give” by making comrades of men, by insisting upon “more freedom and honesty in the marriage relation,” and by finding “a vital interest in some work of her own,”¹⁶ but marriage remained the ultimate goal of most women's youthful energies and marriage was still an institution hemmed in by tradition.

Premarital sex was far less widespread than it is today. Paula Fass estimates that “probably something less than one-half of all college women in the 1920s experienced coitus prior to marriage, and considerably more than one-half of these had restricted that activity to a serious, marriage-oriented relationship” (276).

Despite the emphasis upon independence characteristic of flapper rhetoric, women were still encouraged to view marriage as their most significant experience. Genevieve Taggard, poet and feminist though she was, wrote: “Marriage is the only profound human experience; all other human angles are its mere rehearsal.”¹⁷ The new pressure to marry showed up even in the graduates of women's colleges. This cohort had distinguished itself in the 1890s by choosing career over marriage in relatively large numbers, causing some conservative critics to predict that women's colleges would be the end of the race. Now over 90 percent of the Ivy League women questioned said they wanted to marry and would give up a job if it conflicted with marriage.¹⁸

It is easy for us to see the inherent contradictions in the picture evoked by Bromley's article and the Ivy League questionnaire. The two great cries of the twenties, love and freedom, could not be easily harmonized. In the first place, young men had radically different expectations than young women concerning the role the wife should play in the marriage, as two social science researchers of this generation, Frank Watson and Clifford Kirkpatrick, discovered. Watson, who studied male students at Haverford College in the early thirties, concluded that only one out of nine men could see themselves accepting a working wife. The sociologist Kirkpatrick, after conducting his survey of the attitudes of college men in the same era, commented: “The abyss of disagreement between the two sexes in regard to the status of women seems to be widening rather than disappearing.”¹⁹

Furthermore, Dorothy Bromley says nothing about who is going to raise the children and how these tasks can be managed while the woman is making herself economically independent. It remains unclear what kind of work she has in mind when she describes the new woman as finding “a vital interest in some work.” Most women could not expect to find jobs inspiring a vital interest. She also says that feminist new-style prefers the company of men, “for [men's] methods are more direct and their view larger,” without explaining how “feminists” can respect themselves while being contemptuous of other women.

This kind of contradiction was inherent in the new situation in which many women found themselves. Encouraged to take their own needs seriously, they were nevertheless restricted in terms of the options offered for satisfying those needs. As Paula Fass presents the paradoxical message of this generation in transition, women found themselves expecting more of marriage because “it was for them the one arena for expression and the only sphere for personal satisfaction. The stress on rights for women in marriage both symbolized and accelerated this process, as it helped to localize completely female emotions and needs to family life” (82).

If it is hard to imagine the average woman successfully negotiating the bargain feminist new-style has made, it is no less difficult to envision women poets of this period escaping the contradictions of the postwar period. Elaine Showalter's collection of autobiographical essays from the twenties helps us see how Genevieve Taggard and other exceptional women assessed their lives. After calling marriage the only profound human experience, Taggard goes on to add:

And yet having it, it is not all I want. It is more often, I think, a final experience than a way of life. But I am a poet—love and mutual living are not nearly enough. It is better to work hard than to be married hard. If, at the beginning of middle age, we have not learned some of the perils of the soul, in this double-selved life, we are pure fools. Self-sufficiency is a myth, of course, but after thirty, … it becomes more and more necessary. (These Modern Women, 67)

Indeed, the trumpet call to freedom is as frequently a part of the rhetoric of these modern women as is the celebration of marriage. Elizabeth Stuyvesant, a dancer, settlement worker, and birth control campaigner, wrote: “The utmost measure of freedom—economic, intellectual, emotional—is the sine qua non of the good life” (97). And Phyllis Blanchard, a distinguished child psychologist, summed up her situation in 1926 again with reference to freedom: “With marriage … I am content. It is as if I had accomplished the impossible feat of eating my cake and having it—for I have both love and freedom, which once seemed to me such incompatible bedfellows” (109).

To summarize, then, popular culture supported as intensely as ever the view that heterosexual love was the test situation for assessing a woman's success or failure. However, success in modern terms meant the preservation of a sense of independence along with commitment. Self-gratification, rather than duty or self-sacrifice, was to be the end result of the love relation, freedom the sine qua non of the good life.

In this climate a whole generation of women poets blossomed and the world of publishing turned once again, as it had in the mid-nineteenth century, to considering the nature of women's poetry. Like Amy Lowell, H. L. Davis in Poetry (September 1927) felt America was seeing “the transference of poetry from the estate of men to that of women; and the alteration (therefore) in the nature and texture of poetry.” Llewellyn Jones, in an article called “The Younger Women Poets” (May 1924), claimed that the younger generation had produced as many major poets in its women as in its men. (He concentrated on Millay, Taggard, Bogan, and Wylie.) Mark Van Doren in the Nation (April 26, 1922) felt compelled to state his conviction that “there is such a thing as woman's poetry, that women write differently from men just as they speak differently from men.” Virginia Moore echoed his sentiments in July 1930 by saying that “women are forever different from men in mind, heart, and racial experience” and that this difference should be expressed in their poetry. “In America women feel their sex and inadvertently confess it almost every time they write a couplet.” Harriet Monroe agreed: “The women poets of our time, in short, have been content to be women; and in thus accepting their destiny they have invaded a field comparatively open to their advance.”²⁰

In order to have a clearer understanding of the terms in which analysts debated the specific strengths and weaknesses of women poets, we can profitably examine a characteristic exchange on the subject which took place between Elizabeth Breuer and Jean Starr Untermeyer in The Bookman in 1923. Breuer's article, entitled “The Flapper's Wild Oats,” bemoaned “the lack of flappers of original talents” in poetry. Not exempting herself from the category she is describing, Breuer sorrows over the fact that “we are women first and artists afterwards.” Dissenting from much contemporary belief, she says: “There is no younger generation of women [poets] in the same terms in which we deal with a younger generation among the men”; this because women continue to lead sheltered existences protected from the realities of life. “Despite her pretense of weary cynicism,” Breuer says, the flapper “graduates from school a confirmed romanticist of the old type, virginal in the knowledge or experience that will vitalize her to creative originality” (emphasis mine). Not until thirty does she gain a degree of self-assurance that young men have in sophomore year at college. Breuer maintains that women are far too ready to conform and, echoing popular assumptions about gender, generalizes that “woman's passivity, beginning with her sex functioning, dominates her entire attitude toward experience.”

Breuer would much rather see the flappers competing openly with men as innovators instead of following what she saw as their conservative path. “Although negative and positive forces are equally vital to life, the women who have made a dent in the masculine pattern of the arts have always been rakehellers or saints, women who disdained their sex attitude of yielding and waiting. You’ve got to be a positive force to fight your way up to the top of the particular world you want to own.”²¹

In the following issue of The Bookman, Jean Starr Untermeyer responded to Breuer's indictment and dissented from it on many points. Whereas Breuer wants women to make a dent “on the masculine pattern of the arts,” Untermeyer holds out for feminine verse. Untermeyer demurs:

I do not assent to Mrs. Breuer's condition that for a woman to be a successful artist she must cast into the discard pile that part of her life that is essentially womanly. … Rather there must be a readjustment, not denial. Woman must bring into her art just those qualities that distinguish her as a woman: her intuition, her insight, her adaptability, her feminine ardor and her dream.²²

With this material as background, Sara Teasdale's work can be seen more clearly as part of the cultural conversation. She emerged as a popular poet precisely at a time when women's roles were under reconsideration, giving voice to the two major preoccupations of this period: love and freedom. In terms of the debate concerning the nature of the poetry women should write, she belongs squarely in the same category as Untermeyer, who was her close friend. Self-representational, as are all the nightingale poets, Teasdale believed that the subject of lyric poetry is always to some degree the sensibility of the poet and said that in writing poetry she was less concerned with communicating with her reader than in finding out about herself. That self was definitely inscribed within the code of femininity that continued to inhibit women in this period, and, unlike Amy Lowell, Teasdale had little desire to compete with men. She wrote: “I have a theory that the only way women can hope to make their work compare with men's work, is not by trying to rival what men say, but by trying to supplement it” (WP 85).

Though essentially nineteenth-century in her sensibility, Teasdale adopts a position ironically close to one some contemporary feminists share: the opinion that women must write out of their “feminine experience” rather than attempt to annex territory traditionally given over to men. Unfortunately, Teasdale's life and the evolution of her persona from virginal passion to passionate virginity suggest that the female experience her work embodies offered little opportunity to create a strong self able to achieve a satisfactory balance between love and freedom. The fact that the social script for women has frequently resulted in such tragic consequences has led some contemporary feminists to advocate drawing upon resources other than social experience for women's art, exploring the pre-oedipal realm, for instance, or “writing the body.”²³ For Teasdale, however, such choices were inconceivable. Her story, and the social script that it exemplifies, help to put into perspective our recent troubling history of cultural change and continuity.

HISTORY AS BIOGRAPHY

Sara Teasdale was born in 1884 in St. Louis, the late, unexpected offspring of a couple in their forties. Sara's father was a Baptist, and she was intensely attached to him, calling him unself-consciously “my first lover.” But Sara's mother—whose dominant personality affected Sara more directly—was strongly imbued with the Puritan values of her Willard forebears, one of whom founded Concord, Massachusetts. Thus, though Teasdale's Midwestern childhood might seem to exclude her from the company of the thoroughly New England-oriented nightingale poets (like Lowell, Wylie, Bogan, and Millay), she did come into a Puritan legacy through her mother. Writing of her love for the works of Marcel Proust, she would later confess, “All my blood, and all of it is Puritan, more or less, rises against me” (WP 235). Like Genevieve Taggard she would find herself more at home in the East than in the landscape of her birth because her sensibility gravitated toward eastern, fundamentally Puritan, values of resistance and restraint.

Nevertheless, she was also a child of her times in which the artistic spirit was inevitably linked to paganism. Her Greek self, the child of Sappho, belonged like H. D.'s to a pre-Christian realm of sensuality. Ambivalent toward these two warring selves, Teasdale was a perfect candidate for the nightingale tradition, in which such ambivalence runs deep. As William Drake explains it in his chapter “Sara Teasdale and the Feminine Tradition”: “Sara Teasdale's heritage was the divided self—a personality ready for self-fulfillment, rich in outgoing emotion, sensuous, and keenly sensitive, attuned to esthetic rather than moral imperatives, but stricken with a paralyzing obedience to the rigorous proprieties imposed on her in childhood, mainly by her mother” (WP 5).

Growing up lonely and sickly, Sara spent a great deal of time by herself. In compensation, she developed a lively imaginative life that focused upon romance and individual heroism. She read Arthurian romances and particularly loved Richard Hovey's medieval dramas, following the pattern of turn-of-the-century antimodernism outlined by Jackson Lears.

Yet her anti-modernist sympathies did not lead her to androgynous fantasies and nowhere does one hear that Sara Teasdale wished she had been born a boy. In fact, according to one of her friends, “She was not sentimental, but she was extremely romantic. She lived so much in dreams that it was impossible for me to visualize her as a wife or mother. Her spirit remained fixed at the stage of romantic love.”²⁴ Thus, it is possible to say that the persona of the passionate virgin had roots in her psychological makeup as well as in her culture.

During adolescence Teasdale became part of the circle of artistic friends who called themselves the Potters and produced a handmade literary magazine. The Potter's Wheel appeared monthly from 1904 to 1907 and finally drew the attention of William Marion Reedy, whom the poet was to call her “literary Godfather.” Sara Teasdale's career began with publication in Reedy's Mirror, a St. Louis journal with a national reputation for good critical judgment and for having its finger on the nation's cultural pulse. In fact, it was Reedy who in 1913 gave this era its sobriquet by reading the cultural time as “sex o’clock in America.”

Even at this period of her life, Teasdale was writing love poetry. Although she had no male romantic attachment, she created love relationships with her friends, much the way Amy Lowell and Emily Dickinson did. Williamina Parrish, editor of The Potter's Wheel, described Teasdale's poetic inclinations during this period as “Pegs for Pegasus.”

Nevertheless, Teasdale did have deep and romanticized involvements with women. After her adolescent fixation on one particular childhood friend, Bessie Brey, she transferred her affections to an older, married woman, Marion Cummings Stanley. At the end of her life, when she had become a virtual recluse, her closest link with humanity was Margaret Conklin, though Conklin occupied the role of a daughter rather than a romantic fixation. In her last book Teasdale published a poem to Margaret entitled “To M.”:

Till the last sleep, from the blind waking at birth,
          Bearing the weight of the years between the two,
I shall find no better thing upon the earth
          Than the wilful, noble, faulty thing which is you.

(209)

It must be said, however, that Teasdale was not at all in sympathy with the lesbian movements of the 1920s, which counterpointed the dominant ethos like a minor theme, complicated and persistent but hardly heard by most. The poet's friend Zoe Akins seems to have been involved with bohemian lesbianism but Teasdale was appalled by the behavior of the Akins crowd and never accepted, in spite of her references to Sapphic kisses in some poems, that her beloved Sappho was sexually involved with women. Ruth Perry and Maurine Sagoff, in an interesting article entitled “Sara Teasdale's Friendships,” argue that Teasdale's relations with women were much more significant than her relations with men, “in part because the relationships were, for her, protected from physical consequences—all heightened sensibility with no physical demands.”²⁵

Despite her serious ambitions as a poet and her deep affection for other women, Teasdale spent many years underplaying these aspects of her nature and presenting herself as a conventional feminine spirit. This meant denying any undue commitment to a writing career. She wrote to John Myers O’Hara: “Art can never mean to a woman what it does to a man. Love means that” (WP, 43).

Many women writers have found the need to underplay their ambitions in order not to appear unfeminine. Sylvia Plath, for instance, echoes Teasdale's self-misrepresentations forty years later as she attempts to win approval for a noncompetitive, conventionally female self. Both women were ambitious but both cloaked their ambitions in rhetoric designed to make light of them. Both assumed marriage and motherhood would resolve emotional problems and deep-seated frustrations brought about by contradictory self-images. In 1914 Teasdale wrote: “I must marry, for at bottom I am a mother more intensely than I am a lover” (WP, 137). Both women romanticized marriage in highly unrealistic terms. When Teasdale finally agreed to marry Ernst Filsinger, a cultured businessman, she gave him a very misleading impression of her own needs. Thus, Drake says, Ernst might be forgiven for writing to his parents: “Ever since I knew her she has put the duties of true womanhood (motherhood and wifehood) above any art and would I believe rather be the fond mother of a child than the author of the most glorious poem in the language” (WP, 140).

Unlike Plath, however, Teasdale seems to have been unable to take any pleasure in the sexual side of marriage. Marya Zaturenska writes: “Sara Teasdale was extraordinarily virginal, one might say spinsterish. She found the realities of marriage difficult; she was not a domestic type.”²⁶

The irony that the passionate love poet of “flaming youth” should find celibacy preferable to sex is not so peculiar as it seems at first. Underneath much of the increased emphasis on sex in the 1920s lay continued anxieties on the part of women, many of whom were uncomfortable with intercourse, especially since they had only limited control over their own bodies. Victorian inhibitions persisted, as Amy Lowell notes in “The Sisters.”

In “Vox Corporis” Teasdale suggests the power of psychological inhibitions to frustrate even intense sexual desires.

The beast to the beast is calling,
          And the mind bends down to wait;
Like the stealthy lord of the jungle,
          The man calls to his mate.
The beast to the beast is calling,
          They rush through the twilight sweet—
But the mind is a wary hunter;
          He will not let them meet.

(38)

Only three decades earlier, Ella Wheeler Wilcox had also written about lust in a hunting poem called “The Tiger.” The poet of the 1890s, no doubt influenced by Darwinian naturalism, predicts the triumph of the beast (sex) at the expense of the hunter and “the whole rash world of men” he represents.²⁷ Here, however, it is the hunter (the mind) who presents the danger, and it is consummation that is threatened. The popular Freudian belief in the importance of sexual release to psychological health hovers in the background, identifying anxieties in terms of a different code. This poet no longer predicts the triumph of passion over reason. In her scenario impulse falls victim to the (interestingly masculine) interference of the mind.

Despite the self-criticism implicit in “Vox Corporis,” Teasdale was unable to make her mind more responsive to the needs of the body. Furthermore, she soon felt trapped by the discipline of “true womanhood” she had previously endorsed. Confronted with a choice between having a baby and continuing to pursue her career, she opted for abortion, relapsing almost immediately into profound self-hatred. As Drake describes it: “Shortly thereafter she admitted herself to the sanatorium at Cromwell, Connecticut, and through the following months sank into a state of physical weakness and severe emotional depression that lasted nearly a year.”²⁸

Fundamentally, Teasdale found it impossible to negotiate a truce between her Puritan and pagan selves. From 1907 until her death in 1933, she had numerous attacks of what the nineteenth century called neurasthenia. Like Virginia Woolf she was given repeated rest cures, and toward the end of her life she spent more time at various kinds of retreats than she did at home.

Eventually these strains took their toll upon her marriage. By contemporary standards, Ernst Filsinger was a very supportive husband, agreeing to separate hotel rooms and allowing his wife considerable independence for the times. However, his increasing involvement with his work and her increasing disillusionment and depression led her to withdraw further and further into herself. She became the very type of the nineteenth-century woman poet, “a recluse of recluses,” as she called herself, plagued by ill health. She now reevaluated the place of romantic love in her life. “No highly developed, thoroughly self-conscious modern woman can really give her soul and be proud of it. I used to always think that I wanted to lose myself in the man I loved. I see now that I can never do that, and that I was foolish to wish that I could,” she wrote (WP, 148).

Divorce seemed the only solution. Ernst was devastated by her decision, which was forwarded to him by mail while he was out of the country. But her mind was made up. Once the divorce was granted, she briefly enthused: “I’m a free woman. I can do anything I want” (WP, 260). However, like so many women of her time and ours, she found it difficult to convert this opportunity to do anything she wanted into a source of real pleasure and stability. Drake absolves Filsinger of any serious misconduct and ascribes Teasdale's unhappiness in the marriage to her belief that a truly successful relationship would inspire her to a slavish devotion.

In the early days with Ernst she had experimented with this vision of their connection. Her poem “Because,” from Love Songs (1917), clarifies the deep connection she assumed between marriage and female subordination.

Oh, because you never tried
To bow my will or break my pride,
And nothing of the cave-man made
You want to keep me half afraid,
.....And since the body's maidenhood
Alone were neither rare nor good
Unless with it I gave to you
A spirit still untrammeled, too,
Take my dreams and take my mind
That were masterless as wind;
And “Master!” I shall say to you
Since you never asked me to.

(106)

“Because” sums up the progress and regress of early twentieth-century modes of female self-assertion. The speaker announces the importance of her own independence and then surrenders it, voluntarily reinstituting the master/slave relationship so characteristic of romantic thralldom. As an artifact of its time, this poem—with its overlapping discourses of feminism and romantic love—is a classic.

After her divorce from Filsinger, Teasdale never achieved the serenity she so deeply desired. Furthermore, in the maelstrom of her final years, the poet, like Elinor Wylie, Amy Lowell, and Edna Millay, was hit with one death after another. Several of these were suicides. First, Louis and Jean Untermeyer's son, who had been an intimate of Teasdale's group, committed suicide at college. Then Marguerite Wilkinson drowned in ambiguous circumstances. Finally, most shattering of all, Vachel Lindsay, who had once courted Teasdale and was a lifelong friend, swallowed a bottle of Lysol and died in agonizing pain. Within her own world, where she was shut in more and more because of poor health, growing emotional instability, and lack of money, Teasdale herself had been toying with suicide for some time. Her poetry reveals this almost obsessive preoccupation in the late books and this preoccupation may be one reason John Berryman, also “drawn slowly to the foamless weir” of a self-inflicted death, found the late work so moving.

Like many women in the wake of divorce, Teasdale discovered she could not be as delightfully self-sufficient as she had hoped. What did the freedom of a feminist-new style actually mean? Economic realities dictated that few divorced women could be financially independent enough to retain a comfortable middle-class existence. Having grown up with financial security and even indulgence, Teasdale suddenly found herself strapped for funds. She had never enjoyed housekeeping and chose to live in hotels where she was excused from the burdens of cooking and cleaning. Now this life-style was difficult to maintain. Her visits to the sanitarium in Connecticut (which also housed Louise Bogan for a period) also cut into her funds. Though Teasdale was never reduced to poverty, the last years of her life, like the last decades of Bogan's, were plagued by loneliness, depression, and financial anxieties.

There is some evidence that Sara Teasdale was worried about the possibility that she might have a stroke such as had killed her friend Amy Lowell and disabled her brother. When a blood vessel broke in her hand, she took it as a sign of the end. Her circle of friends had also diminished dramatically, and near the end of her life she allowed only Margaret Conklin easy access. Even with Margaret she was sometimes fractious and dismissive.

On January 29, 1933, she took an overdose of sleeping pills and lay down in a warm bath. Her nurse seems to have ignored her duty to watch Teasdale carefully. When she found the poet, she called the doctor. Drake concludes: “The water in the tub was still warm and death had occurred only a short time before, suggesting that Sara might have timed her action in the hope that she would be discovered before it was too late” (WP, 292).

Yet, in many ways Teasdale's death had been coming for a long time. The impassioned voice of “flaming youth” had long since become the voice of a middle-aged woman who had measured the hollowness of her culture's liberationist rhetoric and opted instead for radical autonomy.

FROM VIRGINAL PASSION TO PASSIONATE VIRGINITY

Examining Sara Teasdale's poetry, we also find the poet evolving from an early preoccupation with passionate love through a period of disillusionment to the late concern with autonomy and death. Helen of Troy, Rivers to the Sea, and Love Songs are the books of virginal passion. Flame and Shadow (1920) announces its position in its title, midway between the books preoccupied with love and those overshadowed by death. Dark of the Moon and Strange Victory offer us a persona whose most recognizable trait is her passionate virginity, a lonely voice “in a darkening garden.”

Teasdale's reputation was established in her early phase, however, and her readers and critics continued to associate her with passionate love even after she had ceased to address most of her poems to a lover and began instead to consider her relationship to herself most important. Harriet Monroe's assessment of Sara Teasdale, published in Poets and Their Art (1932), notices that the girlish element found in Teasdale's first three books darkens in Flame and Shadow and after, but even Monroe calls Teasdale “a poet whose songs give the woman's version of the human love-story, or at least as much of it as one of the finer, more sensitive and protected women of our veiled and walled-in civilization may contribute to the whole vast epic of the human race.”²⁹

If Harriet Monroe, who knew the poet's work very well and had watched Teasdale's progress closely through the years, could miss the profound changes that had occurred in Teasdale's orientation, it is not surprising that other readers continued to categorize her as primarily a love poet. Rivers to the Sea (1915) and Love Songs (1917) had been highly successful volumes in which the passionate persona predominated.

However, in Flame and Shadow Teasdale exhibits considerable frustration with her previous avatar. In the significantly named “Songs for Myself,” she longs to be free of herself and to have a heart “as bare / As a tree in December” (“The Tree,” 156). In “At Midnight” she claims:

Even love that I built my spirit's house for,
          Comes like a brooding and a baffled guest,
And music and men's praise and even laughter
          Are not so good as rest.

(156)

Though an earlier Teasdale persona sought freedom through love, this later one declares, “Only the lonely are free” (“Morning Song,” 141).

Probably the most significant poem from this collection is one called “The Sanctuary,” a poem written and rewritten in the nightingale tradition from the nineteenth century onward.

If I could keep my innermost Me
Fearless, aloof and free
Of the least breath of love or hate,
And not disconsolate
At the sick load of sorrow laid on men;
If I could keep a sanctuary there
Free even of prayer,
If I could do this, then,
With quiet candor as I grew more wise
I could look even at God with grave forgiving eyes.

(151)

Sanctuary poems are written by the nineteenth-century poetesses, Louise Imogen Guiney, Amy Lowell, Elinor Wylie, H. D., Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Louise Bogan. Generally it is the burden of emotional demands, feeling too much for others, and “the sick load of sorrow laid on men” that these women seek protection from, though it may also be protection from aggression within and without that fosters the fantasy of a sanctuary. In spite of the psychologically documentable tendency among some women to ground identity and values in relationships with others, poets in the nightingale tradition repeatedly wish for independence in the name of self-preservation. “Fearless, aloof, and free” is what Teasdale wishes to be. Fear and dependence are the problems that, therefore, must threaten her “innermost Me.”

Teasdale's repeated longings for freedom and autonomy call into question the universality of what Carol Gilligan has described as woman's “different voice.” Though strongly enmeshed in a network of interpersonal relations, Teasdale began as early as 1920 to explore her own need to exist separate from others. What Cora Kaplan has described as “the ‘self’ that occupies the place-from-which-I-can-write”³⁰ was vitally important to Teasdale, and that self seems to have been threatened by relationships that became too demanding.

Thus, Sara Teasdale's work exemplifies in the alternation of its moods the two passionate preoccupations of its time—love and freedom—but it does so by suggesting the poet's inability to resolve them into a single program of action. Thus, this work achieves distinction for the way it illuminates the strain between models of identity-formation based on commitment and conflicting models, characterized as masculine by Gilligan and others, based on autonomy.

If Flame and Shadow suggests a growing dissatisfaction with passionate love as the primary goal of life, Dark of the Moon (1926) seems more than ever designed to create an image of the poet as passionate in her commitment to virginity. No longer is she chaste from lack of experience. Instead, her chastity is a chosen status lifting her above the “people rushing / In restless self-importance to and fro.” White is her preferred color in the last books, which no longer tell stories of urban incidents but prefer the polar privacy of stars, desolate seashore, and what Sylvia Plath would call “the light of the mind, cold and planetary.”

“The Crystal Gazer” poems insist upon the importance of isolation and self-definition. In the title poem Teasdale writes: “I shall gather myself into myself again, / I shall take my scattered selves and make them one” (179). “The Solitary” advances the vision of this sybil who watches at a distance. She is now “self-complete as a flower or a stone” and, having reached midlife, incurious about others “if I have myself and the drive of my will” (179). “Leisure” finds her “Sharing with no one but myself the frosty / And half-ironic musings of my mind” (181).

“Day's Ending,” written in 1921, is probably the clearest rejection of the romantic love plot that informed so many of her earlier poems. Here, in Tucson, watching the mountains and the stars, the speaker claims to have experienced a revelation.

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.

(180)

Earlier the phrase “I became a woman” might have led us to expect as a consequence some reference to romantic passion in the popular sense that one “becomes a woman” when one loses one's virginity. But here Teasdale surprises us by asserting that becoming a woman means growing beyond the expectation that love will save us from having to exist independently. True womanhood means assuming the mantle of the virgin, defined as an autonomous being, “not altered by human activity.”³¹

Sara Teasdale's late persona is nowhere more fully embodied than in the particularly lovely and mysterious poem “Effigy of a Nun.”

Infinite gentleness, infinite irony
          Are in this face with fast-sealed eyes,
And around this mouth that learned in loneliness
          How useless their wisdom is to the wise.
In her nun's habit carved, patiently, lovingly,
          By one who knew the ways of womankind,
This woman's face still keeps, in its cold wistful calm,
          All the subtle pride of her mind.
These long patrician hands, clasping the crucifix,
          Show she had weighed the world, her will was set;
These pale curving lips of hers, holding their hidden smile,
          Once having made their choice, knew no regret.
She was of those who hoard their own thoughts carefully,
          Feeling them far too dear to give away,
Content to look at life with the high, insolent
          Air of an audience watching a play.
If she was curious, if she was passionate
          She must have told herself that love was great,
But that the lacking it might be as great a thing
          If she held fast to it, challenging fate.
She who so loved herself and her own warring thoughts,
          Watching their humorous, tragic rebound,
In her thick habit's fold, sleeping, sleeping,
          Is she amused at dreams she has found?
Infinite tenderness, infinite irony
          Are hidden forever in her closed eyes,
Who must have learned too well in her long loneliness
          How empty wisdom is, even to the wise.

“Effigy of a Nun” (172)

This poem is written in dactylic tetrameter, though the poet varies the meter in a number of places. Unusual for Teasdale, this meter has the effect of seeming almost effortless, dreamlike, perhaps soporific. The rocking rhythm establishes itself as a retrospective and thoughtful measure in the context of this poem's subject matter.

Dactylic meter is hard to handle successfully since its domination may become enervating. But Teasdale manages it here by alternating feminine with masculine endings and by breaking up the dactyls with trochees and other kinds of metrical feet. Though the immediate effect of the meter is to establish an undulant ease, a sensation of certainty suggested in the notion of time as a dance, the poem's alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes, like its division into opposing versions of the nun's experience (stanzas 2-4 versus 5-7) contradict this effect and provide the mystery which is the poem's most appealing attribute.

In brief, this poem captures both Teasdale's belief in the rewards of autonomy and her lingering doubt as to whether a life lived without romantic connections can be ultimately successful. We recognize, for instance, the sybil from the “Crystal Gazer” poems in “She was of those who hoard their own thoughts carefully” and in the nun's “high, insolent / Air of an audience watching a play.” If it is true that “her will was set” and that once having made her choice, she “knew no regret,” then Teasdale asks us to admire this superior virgin whose self-satisfaction resides in “the subtle pride of her mind.”

However, stanza 6, beginning “She who so loved herself,” breaks the poetic pattern both stylistically and referentially. Already in stanza 5 the poet has introduced hypothetical elements in the nun's character—curiosity and passion—which conflict with what seems earlier to be the dominant interpretation of the nun's self-satisfied and renunciatory nature. In the last three stanzas Teasdale explores possible counter-projections. Perhaps the nun was not so happy after all. Line three of the sixth stanza begins with two dactyls but ends with two trochees, suggesting a pause to reconsider, a pause which results in the question: “Is she amused at dreams she has found?” The phrasing of this question wilfully ignores an opportunity for a dactyl—amused at the dreams—in favor of a trochee, again creating the feeling that the speaker is no longer sure how to assess the success of the nun's renuciatory posture.

Though at the beginning the nun's face suggests “How useless their wisdom is to the wise,” we cannot know what this means immediately and the context created by the first five stanzas implies that usefulness may not be the highest good. Though the nun's wisdom is useless, it may yet transform her into a creature self-complete as a flower or a stone; such wisdom may be useless only in the sense that it has no telos beyond itself.

Though we may safely say that projection is operating throughout this reading of the effigy, Teasdale only admits to her projections in the last section of the poem, where the must haves and the interpretation of the content of closed eyes (rather than open faces) alert us that she has dispensed with even the pretense of sculptural criticism in order to tell her own story.

In her own story the persona of the passionate virgin is a dignified and imposing figure, credited with genuine depth and insight. Still, “all the subtle pride of her mind” may not be enough to offset the feeling of emptiness that lack of love produces.

“How I would like to believe in tenderness— / The face of the effigy … / Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes,” says Sylvia Plath in “The Moon and the Yew Tree.” But both Plath and Teasdale, as suicide approaches, read other meanings than tenderness in the configuration of their circumstances. Teasdale finds in the effigy the irony of an empty wisdom. Plath turns from the effigy to the moon and the yew tree: “And the message of the yew tree is blackness—blackness and silence.”³²

“Every act of individuation, every putting away of childish things and outgrown relationships, every advance involves a concomitant loss that anticipates the ultimate loss of the self,” writes Gloria Erlich.³³ Though her reference is to Hawthorne, this is a resonant statement for Sara Teasdale's work. Her passionate virginity, in the end, becomes a script for suicide. Both Dark of the Moon and Strange Victory, like Plath's Ariel and Winter Trees, convey a sense of inexorable progress toward death. “Since Death Brushed Past Me,” from Teasdale's last book, ends: “My words are said, my way is clear” (213).

Yet, in recognizing that the poet ultimately chose her own death, one need not conclude that she was only and everywhere defeated. Her suicide may be seen also as a way of taking control of her life, her most thoroughly autonomous gesture. In this context, “Strange Victory”—in which two old friends meet on the battle-field—achieves added resonance. The poet seems to have felt grateful at the end of her life for special blessings:

To this, to this, after my hope was lost,
          To this strange victory;
To find you with the living, not the dead,
          To find you glad of me;
To find you wounded even less than I,
          Moving as I across the stricken plain;
After the battle to have found your voice
          Lifted above the slain.

(208)

This poem is poignant because its use of infinitives evokes the rapture of surprise: “to find,” “to find,” “to find.” Yet it is significant that in the end she writes “to have found,” as though the moment of elation were past and, in its aftermath, she knows her way lies in another direction.

“Strange Victory” effectively draws upon the classical heritage Teasdale admired in the poems of Sappho. It reads like a fragment found in a sarcophagus. “In a Darkening Garden,” which bears close relation to Louise Bogan's “After the Persian,” is also classical in its bearing and restraint and deserves quotation here as an example of the way Teasdale associates maturity with an acceptance of death and of the life that continues in spite of it.

Gather together, against the coming of night,
          All that we played with here,
Toys and fruits, the quill from the sea-bird's flight,
          The small flute, hollow and clear;
The apple that was not eaten, the grapes untasted—
          Let them be put away.
They served for us, I would not have them wasted,
          They lasted out our day.

(209)

In her final assessment of Sara Teasdale almost twenty years after her death, Louise Bogan wrote: “Miss Teasdale's lyrics … accompanied her experience of life step by step; they became increasingly lucid and tragic with the passage of time. She expressed not only the simplicities of traditional feminine feeling, but new subtleties of emotional nuance, and her last book, Strange Victory, … shows classic depth and balance.”³⁴

Of course, the use of classical techniques does not itself confer value, but in Teasdale's case it seems to offset the more conventional nightingale excesses of her early work and it therefore becomes significant. When Carolyn Kizer writes of “the sad sonneteers, toast-and-teasdales we loved at thirteen; / Middle-aged virgins seducing the puerile anthologists / Through lust of the mind,”³⁵ she seems to be thinking of the virginal passion of Teasdale's early work. Against this set of condescending references, Teasdale's late dignity and restraint look refreshingly tough-minded.

Yet the persona of the passionate virgin is no more and no less intimately connected with Teasdale's cultural experience as a woman than was her earlier avatar, which Amy Lowell named “the dainty erotic.”³⁶ Her reaction against the modern was also a recapitulation of it. Having initially chosen a persona in tune with popular culture, she ultimately gives us the first extended set of reflections on the burdens of autonomy for a twentieth-century woman poet, a significant feat in itself.

The work of Sara Teasdale embodies in important ways the ideologies of her time, yet it also critiques those ideologies, showing the instability of the attempt to rationalize modes of affiliation and autonomy in a world where such modes were still deeply contaminated with gendered moral imperatives.

Notes

1. All the quotations from Teasdale's poetry, except where otherwise noted, are from The Collected Poems of Sara Teasdale (New York: Macmillan, 1966). I have used this edition instead of the more recent, expanded Mirror of the Heart: Poems of Sara Teasdale, ed. William Drake (New York: Macmillan, 1984), because it is more widely available and was for a long time in paperback.

2. See Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982). Gilligan's argument, with its emphasis on a female ethic of affiliation, is much more relevant to Teasdale's first three books than it is to the later ones.

3. William Drake, Sara Teasdale: Woman and Poet (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979), 151. All future quotations from this work will appear in the text as WP, page reference following. Also see Drake's other works, the introduction to Mirror of the Heart and his fascinating recent study of women poets and social issues, The First Wave: Women Poets in America 1915-1945 (New York: Macmillan, 1987).

4. Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics (London: Methuen, 1985), 67-68.

5. For a useful discussion of romantic thralldom, see Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Writing beyond the Ending (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985), 66-83.

6. In Feminism and Poetry, Jan Montefiore examines Christina Rossetti's “Self-Definition by Renunciation.” Her assessment of Rossetti, similar to mine of Teasdale, concludes that Rossetti's defining characteristic is the creation of a voice of inhibited longing (see 125-34). For a discussion of Rossetti's influence on Teasdale, see note 12 below.

7. Freud's articulation of penis envy appears particularly in the essay “Femininity,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, James Strachey, ed., Vol. 22. For Lacan on lack, see Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1981), esp. “The Subject and the Other: Alienation,” 203-15.

8. For a discussion about the way sorrow became literary capital for women, see The Nightingale's Burden, esp. 88-93.

9. See Mossberg, “Hunger in the House,” in Emily Dickinson: When a Writer Is a Daughter, 135-46.

10. Maria Brooks, Zóphiël; or, The Bride of Seven (Boston: Carter and Hendee, 1933), 230-31.

11. The Answering Voice, Sara Teasdale, ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917); revised, with fifty recent poems added (New York: Macmillan, 1928), ix-xii.

12. WP 287. Teasdale's relationship with Christina Rossetti is discussed by Drake in Sara Teasdale: Woman and Poet, esp. 282-88, and The First Wave, esp. 13-14.

13. Margaret Haley Carpenter, Sara Teasdale, A Biography (New York: Schulte, 1960), 311.

14. In 1926 my mother, who published under the name “Marilyn,” received a letter from William Briggs of Harper & Bros. The letter indicates as much as anything that Harper's, who also published Edna St. Vincent Millay, was on the lookout for more female talent. Briggs wrote: “One who has the skill of expression, and the power of feeling, in the degree that you have, is well equipped to write poetry of more than passing interest. It occurred to me that probably you had enough verse in hand to make a collection. … I can assure you now of our genuine interest in the possibility of publishing it, and we shall give you a prompt decision.” My mother at the age of twenty was both shy and cynical; she considered the offer both an intrusion on her privacy and an attempt to get her to give them money; she never responded. As an indication of how thoroughly young women poets like my mother were influenced by Teasdale, here is part of a poem my mother wrote called “Gift.” It begins: “I would give you a song all fragrant of heather” and ends:

    Yes, I would give you a song but lest I falter
              In my fine words and fail my final vow,
    I have laid silence for you as an altar
              And silence I do believe is better now.

    Such poems were surely written by young women all over the United States in the twenties. Silence and renunciation were still profoundly attractive to these early twentieth-century women.

15. Paula S. Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (New York: Oxford UP, 1977), 6. All future references to Fass's work will appear in the text with the page number following the quotation.

16. Dorothy Dunbar Bromley, “Feminist New-Style,” Harper's 155 (1927), 552-60, esp. 555.

17. Quoted in Elaine Showalter, ed., These Modern Women: Autobiographical Essays from the Twenties (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1978), 67; hereafter cited in the text with page reference following quotation.

18. For a discussion of these and other studies affecting this period, see Mary P. Ryan, Womanhood in America from Colonial Times to the Present, 2d ed. (New York: Franklin Watts, 1979).

19. Frank D. Watson, “What Some College Men Want to Know about Marriage and the Family,” Social Forces 11 (1932), 240; Clifford Kirkpatrick, “Student Attitudes toward Marriage and Sex,” Journal of Educational Sociology 9 (1936), 550.

20. For discussions of women on the poetry scene, see H. L. Davis, “Enter the Woman,” Poetry 30 (Sept. 1927), 338-46, esp. 338; Llewellyn Jones, “The Younger Woman Poets,” The English Journal 13 (May 1924), 301-310; Mark Van Doren, “Women as Poets,” Nation 114 (April 26, 1922), 498-99; Virginia Moore, “Women Poets,” Bookman 71 (July 1930), 388-93; Harriet Monroe, “Voices of Women,” in Poets and Their Art (New York: Macmillan, 1926), 141-54, esp. 141.

21. Elizabeth Breuer, “The Flapper's Wild Oats,” Bookman 57 (March 1923), 1-6, 57; esp. 5.

22. Jean Starr Untermeyer, “Response to Breuer,” Bookman 57 (June 1923), 480-81.

23. For a prominent proponent of these ideas, see Luce Irigaray, “And the One Doesn’t Stir Without the Other,” trans. Helene Vivienne Wenzel, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 7 (Autumn 1981), 60-67; and This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985), esp. “When Our Lips Speak Together,” 205-18.

24. Carpenter, 33.

25. Ruth Perry and Maurine Sagoff, “Sara Teasdale's Friendships,” New Letters 46 (Fall 1979), 101-7, esp. 101. See also Drake, First Wave, 52-63 and 241-49.

26. Marya Zaturenska, “The Strange Victory of Sara Teasdale,” introduction to The Collected Poems, xxx.

27. For a discussion of “The Tiger,” by Wilcox, see The Nightingale's Burden, 126-27.

28. Drake, Mirror of the Heart, xxxiv.

29. Monroe, Poets and Their Art, 74.

30. Kaplan, Sea Changes, 225.

31. Though this may be using the term virgin somewhat loosely, applying to a person a meaning usually reserved for flora (as in virgin timber), we should remember that the conception of detachment Teasdale chooses is inextricable from antihumanistic spiritual traditions connected to the Virgin Mary. In this sense we can say that the idea of the virgin as a being unaltered by human activity is relevant to Teasdale toward the end of her life.

32. Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 172-73.

33. Gloria Erlich, Family Themes and Hawthorne's Fiction: The Tenacious Web (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1984), 6.

34. Louise Bogan, Achievement in American Poetry (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1951), 75-76.

35. Carolyn Kizer, Knock Upon Silence (Seattle: U of Washington P, 1968), 47.

36. See Lowell, A Critical Fable, in Complete Poems, 420.