Sara Teasdale was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in August 1884 and committed suicide in New York City in January 1933. She was the youngest child of a prim middle-class family and grew up believing she was a fragile, helpless girl, vulnerable to a variety of undetermined illnesses, both physical and emotional. Her perceived frailty resulted in lifelong bouts of nervous exhaustion and chronic weakness, and she remained dependent upon her parents until she married at age thirty. After being schooled at home, Teasdale ventured out of the house long enough to become acquainted with a local women's poetry group and began writing poetry in her early twenties. Her fondness for music was reflected in the lyric poems she wrote, most very rhythmic and many of which ended up set to musical scores. Her work at the time centered primarily on love from a woman's perspective, and its...