Sara Teasdale

1884–1933

Sara Teasdale (1884–1933) was an American lyric poet from St. Louis, Missouri. She published several collections, and Love Songs (1917) won the first Columbia Poetry Prize, the award that became the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Her short, musical poems speak of love, beauty, longing and, increasingly, death, in clear and simple language. “There Will Come Soft Rains”, written during the First World War, later became famous through Ray Bradbury’s story of the same name; “I Shall Not Care”, “Barter” and “Night” are also widely anthologised. She lived in New York from 1916 and died there in 1933.

Best-known poems

All poems (19)

Poets of the same era

Edgar Lee Masters 1868–1950 Rudyard Kipling b. 1865 Amy Lowell 1874–1925 William Butler Yeats 1865–1939 Paul Laurence Dunbar 1872–1906 Stephen Crane 1871–1900 Rupert Brooke 1887–1915 Maxwell Bodenheim 1892–1954