Sara Teasdale

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1884, Sara Teasdale was educated privately and began publishing poetry while still young. She became associated with the literary circle around Poetry magazine in Chicago, and her early books helped establish her as one of the most admired lyric poets of her time.

Her writing is especially loved for its simplicity, melody, and emotional directness. Rather than aiming for grand statements, she focused on inner feeling and the natural world, which gave her poems a delicate but memorable strength. In 1918, she received the Columbia University Poetry Society prize for Love Songs, an award that soon became recognized as the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Teasdale spent her later years in New York and died in 1933. Though her life was brief, her poems have remained widely read because they speak so clearly about longing, beauty, loneliness, and the passing of time.