Love Songs (Version 2)

With classical, lyrical tones, and frequently feminist-influenced themes, Sara Teasdale’s Love Songs established her as one of the leading writers in the new Romanticism movement. The book of poems, originally published in 1917, saw five additional printings before its 1918 edition owing to the tremendous demand for her work. The collection was selected as the 1918 winner of the Columbia University Poetry Prize (a precursor to the Pulitzer Prize for poetry). In spite of her commercial success and influence on other female poets such as Edna St. Vincent Millay, the style of Teasdale’s work fell out of fashion and has often been ignored in anthologies of work from that period. Here we offer a reading of the 1918 edition of her work. - Summary by Elise Dee