The work of Sara Teasdale captured the hearts of many Americans through her lyrical simplicity and delicate craftsmanship on the major themes of love, beauty, and death. Her poetry was often quoted, parodied, and set to music by the public. They awarded her the Columbia University Society Prize and the Poetry Society of America Prize in 1918 for her poem collection title Love Songs. However, her major success as a lyrical poet proved true when her work continued to sell posthumously. Throughout Teasdale’s lyrical poetry, she depends heavily on metaphors and personification, simple diction, and romantic imagery to produce a melancholy tone and to gain a sympathetic response from her reader on the impossible feat of satisfying the contrasting needs of her Puritan and Pagan ways of life.
Sara Teasdale was the daughter of the puritan, Midwestern Victorian couple: Mary Elizabeth Willard and John Warren Teasdale. Her father, John, was a prosperous St. Louis wholesaler; while her mother, Mary, “strove for perfect middle-class rectitude” (Drake). Teasdale’s parents constantly fretted over her, due to her frailty and constant chronic illness. Willard and Teasdale sheltered, protected, and educated their daughter in the best private schools. This closeness with her parents greatly influenced Teasdale’s priorities and “left her almost obsessed with propriety and dependent both emotionally and financially on her domineering mother and father, whom she idolized” (Lipscomb). Throughout her life, Sara Teasdale sought out a marriage like her parents’ – one that was socially acceptable and economically secure. However, the conservatism and conventional puritan child had hidden pagan instincts. This side of Teasdale had “an ecstatic love of bea...
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Born on December 25, 1921, Clara grew up in a family of four children, all at least 11 years older than her (Pryor, 3). Clara’s childhood was more of one that had several babysitters than siblings, each taking part of her education. Clara excelled at the academic part of life, but was very timid among strangers. School was not a particularly happy point in her life, being unable to fit in with her rambunctious classmates after having such a quiet childhood. The idea of being a burden to the family was in Clara’s head and felt that the way to win the affection of her family was to do extremely well in her classes to find the love that she felt was needed to be earned. She was extremely proud of the positive attention that her achievement of an academic scholarship (Pryor, 12). This praise for her accomplishment in the field of academics enriched her “taste for masculine accomplishments”. Her mother however, began to take notice of this and began to teach her to “be more feminine” by cooking dinners and building fires (Pryor, 15). The 1830’s was a time when the women of the United States really began to take a stand for the rights that they deserved (Duiker, 552). Growing up in the mist of this most likely helped Barton become the woman she turned out to be.
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