[In the following laudatory assessment of Strange Victory, Bogan deems the collection “the final expression of a purely lyrical talent and of a poetic career remarkable for its integrity throughout.”]

Lyric poetry, however deeply felt and felicitously contrived, nowadays falls dangerously near the line dividing the romantic nostalgia and mock heroics of the nineteenth century from more complicated and turbulent contemporary writing. The taste which cherished the simple lyric cry of grief, ecstasy or regret written into a sonnet or a series of quatrains has given way; modern ears demand a more complicated stimulus. It is practically impossible for a poet to express simply and without apology or blague direct emotion concerning his own passions and his intimations of the universe at large. The human heart would seem to be outmoded; the eye of eternity has become an intellectual instead of a metaphysical concept. Yeats puts his later songs into the mouths of crazed maidens and fools.

Strange Victory, Sara Teasdale's last book, published posthumously, is the final expression of a purely lyrical talent and of a poetic career remarkable for its integrity throughout. An interval of more than twenty years separates Miss Teasdale's first book from her last. She correctly valued the quality of her talent from the start. Her matter—the record of a sensitive and gifted woman's emotions—was always rendered with clarity and justice definitely within the limits of her manner. Her range was far less wide than Emily Dickinson's: she never permitted herself any break with form or any flights into speculation; on the other hand, she added to a poetic equipment inherited in part from Emily Brontë and Christina Rossetti qualities peculiar to herself; a frankness of attack utterly lacking in her forerunners.

Miss Teasdale's sensibilities were completely sincere and therefore could function with freedom under the canons of her art. The pure lyric gift is notoriously narrow but notoriously strict as well. Its effects are based upon a true, subtle and naïve ear, and upon intensity rather than complexity of emotion. It is a medium that requires sincerity both in feeling and expression; inflation, cleverness and falsity show up only too plainly under its simple but inflexible demands. Sara Teasdale's poetry reflected, without distortion, every emotional change in her life from youth to late maturity. The two halves of her talent were delicately adjusted to one another to the end; her manner became clearer as her emotions became more calm. And because she had absolute faith in her own gift, she could eliminate from her work every effect of rhetoric. The twenty-two lyrics in her last book are poems reduced to the simplest terms. If a contemporary audience for lyric poetry may be postulated, the moving simplicity of these final poems must delight any responsive ear therein.