Sunday Pages: "Barter"

A poem by Sara Teasdale

Mar 09, 2025

The winner of the very first Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, back in 1918—so long ago, it was still called the Columbia University Poetry Society Prize—was Sara Teasdale. Her work was new to me, but in her day, she was enormously popular with both the general public and other poets. Vachel Lindsay, for one, was madly in love with her—although she spurned him for a longtime admirer who was a big wheel in the export business (“an expert on foreign trade,” per his Times obituary—whatever that meant during Prohibition) and who had enough dough to buy them an apartment on tony Central Park West.

She was a sickly child, and spent a lot of her time alone in the handsome manse in St. Louis, where she grew up. Loneliness permeates her work, like an unwashoutable perfume. Her poems are lyrical and accessible and, typically, teeming with broken-heart melancholy. “I Shall Not Care” is representative of her general woe-is-me aesthetic:

When I am dead and over me bright April
Shakes out her rain-drenched hair,
Though you should lean above me broken-hearted,
I shall not care.

I shall have peace, as leafy trees are peaceful
When rain bends down the bough,
And I shall be more silent and cold-hearted
Than you are now.

After the First World War, literature—and poetry especially—changed abruptly. Poets demanded more of their readers. There was more allusiveness, more complexity, more tinkering with form, more of what the critic Paul Fussell calls “the irony of benign ignorance.” Poets like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Amy Lowell, W.B. Yeats and E.E. Cummings reimagined what poetry could be.

Teasdale was not interested in pushing poetical boundaries. Her work was more static. She had her bag of tricks and stuck to it. This hurt her literary reputation. As the Modern American Poetry Site (MAPS) of Framingham State University diplomatically explains, she “gradually fell out of favor after her death. The image she was willing to benefit from—that of a romantic yearning for erotic fulfillment—did not help her status during the heyday of the New Criticism.”

Almost every critical reference to her work, then and now, lauds its musicality. As the Poetry Foundation notes:

Reviewing the 1915 volume Rivers to the Sea, a New York Times Book Review contributor deemed the book “a little volume of joyous and unstudied song.” Such damningly faint praise followed Teasdale throughout her career; critics found her poetry “unsophisticated” but full of musical language and evocative emotion. A New York Times Book Review contributor, writing about the 1917 edition of Love Songs, asserted that “Miss Teasdale is first, last, and always a singer.”

In A History of Modern Poetry (1976), to cite another example, the critic David Perkins characterizes her work as “the brief, lyric utterance of elemental emotion.” Over and over, she told the same heartbreaking story: “She loves, she loves no more, she longs to be loved, she is not loved in return, or not so much as before; but who, when, how, and why are all omitted, for she wished to avoid anything that might complicate and so lessen her immediate emotional impact.”

In short, Sara Teasdale was the Taylor Swift of the 1920s.

Seriously: if I were to ask you to guess which of these two passages—

1.
Let it be forgotten, as a flower is forgotten,
Forgotten as a fire that once was singing gold,
Let it be forgotten forever and ever,
Time is a kind friend, he will make us old.

If anyone asks, say it was forgotten
Long and long ago,
As a flower, as a fire, as a hushed footfall
In a long forgotten snow.

and

2.
Here we go again—
The voices in his head
Called the rain to end our days of wild:
Rivulets descend my plastic smile,
But you should have seen him
When he first got me!
My boy only breaks his favorite toys—
I’m queen of sandcastles he destroys.

—was from the “greatest hits” compilation Flame and Shadow, and which was from the third track on The Tortured Poets Department, would you really be able to tell me, with absolute certainty and without Googling, which was which? Are you even sure Flame and Shadow isn’t an early Taylor Swift album?

Sunday Pages: "Midnights"

Greg Olear

October 23, 2022

Read full story

The only way we know “The Look” is not a Swift deep cut is because no one in 2025 is named “Strephon”:

Strephon kissed me in the spring,
Robin in the fall,
But Colin only looked at me
And never kissed at all.
Strephon’s kiss was lost in jest,
Robin’s lost in play,
But the kiss in Colin’s eyes
Haunts me night and day.

This is not to suggest that Teasdale is mid, or even less than; just different. Indeed, for what she’s trying to accomplish, she is, like Swift, as good as it gets. She was a sublime lyricist. I mean, not everyone wants to sit around and read Ezra Pound’s Cantos, KWIM? Teasdale served a critical function—more vital, it seems to me, than most of her fancier contemporaries, with their obscure references to the Upanishads and deliberate, if not outright contemptuous, opacity. She connected with people on an emotional level. She gave voice to what a helluva lot of people were feeling. And she knew it. “The poet must put far from him the amazing word, the learned allusion, the facile inversion, the clever twist of thought,” she explained, in what was clearly a dig at Pound and his pretentious ilk, “for all of these things will blur his poem and distract his reader…. The poet should try to give his poem the quiet [Taylor] [S]wiftness of flame, so that the reader will feel and not think when he is reading.”

Although she was certainly capable of it, Sara Teasdale was not, like Eliot and Co., about intellectual masturbation. In her poetry books, she’s all about venting her emotions. Miss Teasdale is first, last, and always a singer. If she were alive today, she’d be opening for Billie Eilish. But in 1920, alas, there were no pop stars, no woman singer-songwriters playing the clubs in Greenwich Village, no Top 40 radio stations, no streaming services, and very few professional football teams from which to find tight ends to date.

Not that it was all heartbreak and woe. She also, as MAPS notes, “wrote powerful antiwar poems…but chose not to include them in any of her books.” Her poem “There Will Come Soft Rains,” suddenly and urgently relevant in 2025, provided the title for a well-known short story by Ray Bradbury:

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,
Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

Teasdale wrote that in 1917—28 years before we dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 32 years before the Soviets successfully tested a nuclear bomb, 45 years before the Cuban Missile Crisis, and 108 years before the United States gave the nuclear launch codes to DOGE. In our century, the soft rains will sprinkle heavy water, the frogs will glow radioactive green, and Spring will know damned well what hateful creatures were responsible for the extermination of the birds and the incineration of the trees. Ah, the good ol’ days of trench warfare, when we confined ourselves merely to slaughtering one another!

But my purpose today is not to go dark. The reason I am writing about Sara Teasdale this morning is because of a poem I stumbled upon in an anthology—the very first poem, as it turns out, in her very first book of poetry, Love Songs (not to be confused with the early Taylor Swift hit “Love Story”). The title, “Barter,” implies that an exchange takes place, that there is a karmic trade-off we have to be prepared to make in order to access our joy. And we should be willing to do whatever it takes—watch the entire State of the Union Address, drive a Cybertruck, trade Luca Dončić—to consummate the deal.

Me, I don’t give a crap if that fascist prick Ezra Pound is thought of more highly; 19 lines into Cantos, he’s name-dropping Perimedes and Eurylochus, and I have no fucking idea what he’s going on about. No, no. In times like these especially, when all the news seems to be horrific, give me Sara Teasdale! Let the quiet swiftness of flame consume me!

Barter

Life has loveliness to sell,
All beautiful and splendid things,
Blue waves whitened on a cliff,
Soaring fire that sways and sings,
And children’s faces looking up
Holding wonder like a cup.
Life has loveliness to sell,
Music like a curve of gold,
Scent of pine trees in the rain,
Eyes that love you, arms that hold,
And for your spirit’s still delight,
Holy thoughts that star the night.
Spend all you have for loveliness,
Buy it and never count the cost;
For one white singing hour of peace
Count many a year of strife well lost,
And for a breath of ecstasy
Give all you have been, or could be.

That really hits hard, as the kids say.

Things didn’t end well for Teasdale. Her husband the foreign trade specialist would spent months at a time overseas—he would die, in fact, while on a business trip to China—and she was all alone in that posh Upper West Side apartment. In 1929, mere months before Black Thursday, she left New York for 90 days, so she could legally file for divorce. This took the export businessman by surprise; he genuinely loved her and was devastated when she left him. (Travis Kelce, take note!)

Back in New York after the divorce, Teasdale had an on-again-off-again affair with her old flame Vachel Lindsay—who, inconveniently, had a wife and kids he was struggling to provide for, in those bleak Hoover years of the Great Depression. In 1931, in debt and in failing health, the poor bastard guzzled a bottle of lye. His suicide affected Teasdale profoundly. She held out for two more years, until her escalating physical problems left her an invalid, and her chronic depression left her unable to function. Then she swallowed a bottle of barbiturates, fell asleep, and never woke up. She was 48.

And yet, for all of that suicidal sadness, for all of that profound despair, Sara Teasdale, I believe, would have told Taylor Swift, in answer to the question posed in “Blank Space,” that when it was all over, Yes, of course, absolutely, no doubt about it:

The high was worth the pain.

ICYMI

On what was a brutal seven days, we did The Five 8 “neat” this week, meaning no guest.

And in our members-only “Afterhours,” we spilled the tea on our field trip to Harlan Crow’s Adirondack redoubt, and discussed White Lotus and Severance.

Last but not least, I was honored to return to Irish Granny Helen’s excellent program, to talk about my book The Age of Unreality. You can listen here: