Helen of Troy and Other Poems: “I make the most of all that comes and the least of all that goes”

By Sara Teasdale

Sara Trevor Teasdale was born on the 8th August 1884 in St Louis, Missouri.

A woman of poor health it was only at age 10 that she was well enough to begin school when she attended the Mary Institute from 1898, but moving to Hosmer Hall from wh

• Language: English
• Publisher: Portable Poetry
• Release date: Jun 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781839679230

Sara Teasdale

Sara Teasdale (1884-1933) was an American poet. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Teasdale suffered from poor health as a child before entering school at the age of ten. In 1904, after graduating from Hosmer Hall, Teasdale joined the group of female artists known as The Potters, who published The Potter’s Wheel, a monthly literary and visual arts magazine, from 1904 to 1907. With her first two collections—Sonnets to Duse and Other Poems (1907) and Helen of Troy and Other Poems (1911)—Teasdale earned a reputation as a gifted lyric poet from critics and readers alike. In 1916, following the publication of her bestselling Rivers to the Sea (1915), she moved to New York City with her husband Ernst Filsinger. There, she won the 1918 Pulitzer Prize for Love Songs (1917), her fourth collection. Frustrated with Filsinger’s prolonged absences while traveling for work, she divorced him in 1929 and moved to another apartment in the Upper West Side. Renewing her friendship with poet Vachel Lindsay, she continued to write and publish poems until her death by suicide in 1933.

Book preview

Helen of Troy & Other Poems by Sara Teasdale

Sara Trevor Teasdale was born on the 8th August 1884 in St Louis, Missouri.

A woman of poor health it was only at age 10 that she was well enough to begin school when she attended the Mary Institute from 1898, but moving to Hosmer Hall from where she graduated in 1903.

Her first poem was published in William Marion Reedy's Reedy's Mirror, a local newspaper, in 1907.

Later that same year her first collection of poems, ‘Sonnets to Duse and Other Poems’ was published.

Her well received second volume ‘Helen of Troy and Other Poems’, published 4 years later, was praised for its lyrical talents and subject matter.

She was courted by various men among them Vachel Lindsay, a great poet but one who thought he could not provide a suitable standard of living for her.  Sara then married Ernst Filsinger, who also admired her poetry, in 1914.

Sara’s third poetry collection, ‘Rivers to the Sea’, was published in 1915 and was a best seller. A year later, in 1916, the couple moved to New York City.

In 1917 she released her collection ‘Love Songs’ and the following year it won three awards: the Columbia University Poetry Society prize, the annual prize of the Poetry Society of America and, as a crowning achievement, the 1918 Pulitzer Prize for poetry

By 1929 Sara was deeply unhappy and lonely and decided to divorce.  To satisfy the criteria she moved across state lines for three months. She did not wish to inform Filsinger, and only at the insistence of her lawyers, as the divorce was going through, did she—Filsinger was shocked.

After her divorce Sara remained in New York City and resumed her friendship with Vachel Lindsay, who was by this time married with children.

1931 Vachel Lindsay committed suicide.

Two year later on 29th January 1933 Sara Teasdale died from an overdose of sleeping pills. She was 48.  She was buried in the Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis.

Index of Contents

Helen of Troy

Beatrice

Sappho

Marianna Alcoforando

Guenevere

Erinna

Love Songs

Song

The Rose and the Bee

The Song Maker

Wild Asters

When Love Goes

The Wayfarer

The Princess in the Tower

When Love Was Born

The Shrine

The Blind

Love Me

The Song for Colin

Four Winds

Roundel

Dew

A Maiden

I Love You

But Not to Me

Hidden Love

Snow Song

Youth and the Pilgrim

The Wanderer

I Would Live in Your Love

May

Rispetto

Less than the Cloud to the Wind

Buried Love

Song

Pierrot

At Night

Song

Love in Autumn

The Kiss

November

A Song of the Princess

The Wind

A Winter Night

The Metropolitan Tower

Gramercy Park

In the Metropolitan Museum

Coney Island

Union Square

Central Park at Dusk

Young Love

Sonnets and Lyrics

Primavera Mia

Soul's Birth

Love and Death

For the Anniversary of John Keats' Death

Silence

The Return

Fear

Anadyomene

Galahad in the Castle of the Maidens

To an Aeolian Harp

To Erinna

To Cleis

Paris in Spring

Madeira from the Sea

City Vignettes

By the Sea

On the Death of Swinburne

Triolets

Vox Corporis

A Ballad of Two Knights

Christmas Carol

The Faery Forest

A Fantasy

A Minuet of Mozart's

Twilight

The Prayer

Two Songs for a Child

On the Tower

Sara Teasdale – A Concise Bibliography

Helen of Troy and Other Poems

Helen of Troy

Wild flight on flight against the fading dawn

The flames' red wings soar upward duskily.

This is the funeral pyre and Troy is dead

That sparkled so the day I saw it first,

And darkened slowly after.  I am she

Who loves all beauty—yet I wither it.

Why have the high gods made me