SOURCE: “Sara Teasdale,” in Poets and Their Art, Macmillan Co., 1932, pp. 72-7.

In the following essay, Monroe explores the feminine voice in Teasdale's work.

The typical well-read American girl appears and develops in Sara Teasdale's books—and develops, as sometimes happens, into something rarer and finer than her early promise foretold. We have, quite frankly presented, in the Sonnets to Duse, of 1907, and in Helen of Troy and Other Poems, of 1912, this girl's dream “crushes,” her imaginary love-affairs, her tremors and bewilderments, her woes and delights. Even in Rivers to the Sea, of 1915, this girlish softness sometimes persists; but in certain of its poems one notes the beginning of a hardening process which is shaping the girl into a woman and her enthusiastic outpourings into poems—poems of a finished and delicate, if narrow technique. And in some of the new poems in Love Songs, of 1917, and in...