SOURCE: “Women and Selfhood: Sara Teasdale and the Passionate Virgin Persona,” in Masks Outrageous and Austere, Indiana University Press, 1991, pp. 44-66.

In the following essay, Walker evaluates the influence of Teasdale's work on other American poets and discusses the most characteristic persona in her verse: the passionate virgin.

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...