Hailed as an early confessional poet, Sara Teasdale won a Pulitzer Prize in 1918. Teasdale is not entirely considered “lost” — as the website may suggest — but rarely are female confessional poets prior to Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton’s time mentioned to the same multitude. According to modernamericanpoetry.org, Teasdale paved the way for women writers “such as Edna St. Vincent Millay, Margaret Widener, and Elinor Wylie” to succeed. “Synonymous with a new Romanticism,” she “was compared to Christina Rossetti, Blake, and Housman.” The day proceeding her death, at age 38, The New York Times reported that her cause of death was unknown, but was likely a suicide; her passing was later ruled as such, due to an overdose of pills. Her women-centric poetry, like “The Answer,” persists today. Other poems, which are rich in scenery and nature, beauty, and solitariness — such as “February Twilight,” “In the Wood,” and “Leaves” — are a sliver of her work.
