Sara Teasdale was one of the most popular poets of the 1920s and 1930s. She was born the late child of affluent parents living in St. Louis, which, in 1884, was a city in transition, comprised of two distinctly contradictory populations, the first characterized by the puritan heritage from which Teasdale’s family descended, while the second, comprising mostly German immigrants, was mainly centered on aesthetics. The tension between these two cultures and her need to negotiate the critical poetic climate that marked the shift to modernism, a time in which women were attacked for writing about the very feminine spheres deemed appropriate for them, inform most of her work.
Though Teasdale was the daughter of one of St. Louis’s successful businessmen, her parents were concerned that their
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Citation: Keel, Amelia. "Sara Teasdale". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 05 March 2009 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5952, accessed 24 November 2024.]
