“The poet should try to give his poem the quiet swiftness of flame, so…” — Sara Teasdale | V2Melody

“The poet should try to give his poem the quiet swiftness of flame, so that the reader will feel and not think while he is reading.”

Capturing her ideal of poetry as immediate, concentrated emotional experience · Statement on poetic craft, in Marguerite Wilkinson, New Voices, 1919

Art
Poetry

About Sara Teasdale

Sara Teasdale

8 August 1884–29 January 1933

Sara Teasdale was born on 8 August 1884 in St. Louis, Missouri, and died there on 29 January 1933. During her lifetime she became one of the best-known American lyric poets of the early twentieth century, admired for verse that appeared effortless: brief, melodious, emotionally direct, and exquisitely shaped. Her…

More by Sara Teasdale

Poems by Sara Teasdale

More remarks by Sara Teasdale

“Though the passion called love has not changed appreciably during recorded time, our ideas about it have changed constantly, and sometimes with great rapidity.”

Distinguishing the enduring emotion of love from changing social ideas about it · Preface to revised edition, The Answering Voice, 1928

Love
Time

“The poet who chooses this older, more melodic music, and the regular chiming of the rhymes that usually goes with it, should use great care to vary these deftly and spontaneously.”

Counselling subtle variation when working within traditional rhyme and metre · Statement on poetic craft, in Marguerite Wilkinson, New Voices, 1919

“But for a poet consciously to appoint himself the mouthpiece of a certain class or creed en masse, is dangerous business.”

Warning against sacrificing individual truth to an assumed representative role · Statement on poetic craft, in Marguerite Wilkinson, New Voices, 1919

Poetry
Truth