Sara Teasdale

Poet, born in St Louis, Missouri, USA. She was educated privately, travelled in Europe and the Middle East (1905–7), married (1914–29), and settled in New York City (1916). Her books include Love Songs (1917) and Strange Victory (1933). Afflicted with bouts of depression, she committed suicide.

Sara Teasdale (August 8, 1884 – January 29, 1933), was an American lyrical poet. She was born Sarah Trevor Teasdale in St. Louis, Missouri.

Teasdale's major themes were love, nature's beauty, and death, and her poems were much loved during the early 20th century. In 1918 she won the Columbia University Poetry Society prize (the forerunner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry) and the annual prize of the Poetry Society of America for her volume, Love Songs.

Throughout her life, Teasdale suffered poor health and it was not until she was nine that she was judged healthy enough to begin school – a private school for children just one block away from her home.

In 1913, Teasdale was courted by two admirers. The poet Vachel Lindsay fell in love with her and at one point was sending her long, fantastic love letters on a daily basis. Teasdale and Lindsay remained fond but platonic friends throughout their lives, and Lindsay said that she was his life's "most inspiring, most satisfying friend."

Teasdale was very much a product of her Victorian upbringing, and she was never able to experience in life the passion that she expressed in her poetry. Teasdale's health further declined. On the morning of January 29, 1933, in her New York City apartment, Teasdale took an overdose of sleeping pills, lay down in a warm bath, fell asleep, and never woke up again. In 1931, two years before Teasdale's suicide, Vachel Lindsay, her friend and former suitor, had also committed suicide.

In 1994 Sara Teasdale was inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame.

She is interred in the Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis.