SOURCE: “Sara Teasdale,” in Imaginary Gardens: A Study of Five American Poets, Chilton Book Company, 1969, pp. 99-134.

In the following essay, Sprague provides a biographical and critical study of Teasdale and her work.

A lyric poet is always contemporary. He works in the changeless feelings of men, and not in their changing thoughts that shift relentlessly from decade to decade.¹

So Sara Teasdale described Christina Rossetti, in the biography of that poet which she was writing at the time of her death. In this perceptive observation she not only provided the key to Christina Rossetti's continuing popularity; she also unconsciously provided the key to her own. For, like her English predecessor, Sara Teasdale possessed both intuition and insight, in addition to imagination and an exquisite lyric gift. She indeed worked “in the changeless feelings of men,” more particularly of women, and her theme was love, in all its...