Sara Teasdale was one of the most popular poets in America from the years of World War I through the 1920s. Her new work, appearing almost monthly in the major national magazines, was read aloud before large groups (though not by the shy poet herself), quoted and occasionally parodied in the press, and frequently set to music. She was the first recipient, in 1918, of the Columbia Poetry Prize, which later became the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and was highly regarded by her literary contemporaries, including Robert Frost, William Butler Yeats, and Edmund Wilson.

Sara Teasdale's success arose from two essential features in her work: her technical mastery of the brief lyric in simple, sometimes ironic language--she called her poems "songs"--and the fact that she typically wrote of love from a woman's point of view. Probably no other figure, except Sappho, whom Teasdale revered, is so closely identified...