SOURCE: “A Delicate Fabric of Bird Song: The Verse of Sara Teasdale,” in The Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 1, Spring, 1957, pp. 62-6.

In the following essay, Saul addresses the lack of critical attention to Teasdale's work, and reflects on the popularity of her work in the early twentieth century.

I

To anyone remembering Sara Teasdale's decade and a half of popularity and honors following Love Songs taking the 1917 Pulitzer prize for poetry, it seems pathetic—some would prefer to say “ironic”—to recall how sharply death meant a falling off in critical attention to the poetry. One suspects that five years' earlier publication of the Collected Poems (1937) would have meant a consideration which posthumous appearance insured in only fractional degree. And to some of us not given to genuflection before the curious gods of the mid-century, there seems implied a certain injustice: sorry pendant to a history in most...