Sara Teasdale
When the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry was awarded in 1918, Sara Teasdale stood among its recipients — a formal recognition that arrived just a year after her 1917 poetry collection Love Songs appeared in print. That sequence of events, a collection followed swiftly by a prize, sits at the center of her documented career.
Born on August 8, 1884, in St. Louis, Teasdale received her education at the Mary Institute and St. Louis Country Day School. The city shaped her early years, though her life would carry her well beyond Missouri. In 1914 she married, and records of her life note that she took the name Filsinger alongside her literary identity. Her poetry, written in English, continued through these years, and Love Songs, published in 1917, appeared the year before the Pulitzer committee made its recognition official.
Teasdale worked as a poet and writer, and her output placed her within American verse of the early twentieth century. The Pulitzer Prize for Poetry she received in 1918 gave her work an institutional standing, and the Library of Congress's authorized catalog entry — "Teasdale, Sara, 1884–1933" — preserves the span of that career in its most compressed form. Her name, bracketed by those two dates, moves from a St. Louis birth through marriage, through a prize-winning moment, and toward the city where her life ended.
She died in New York City on January 29, 1933, at the age of forty-eight. The Library of Congress record that frames her life between 1884 and 1933 remains one of the most concrete markers of her place among American poets writing in English during the first decades of the twentieth century. The Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, received in 1918, stands as the most formally documented acknowledgment of her work.
Quotes by Sara Teasdale
Sara Teasdale's insights on:

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.

Oh Earth, you gave me all I have, I love you, I love you, – oh what have IThat I can give you in return – Except my body after I die?

Joy was a flame in me Too steady to destroy. Lithe as a bending reed, Loving the storm that sways her.

With my singing I can make, a refuge for my spirit’s sake; a house of shining words, to be my fragile immortality.

I saw a star slide down the sky Blinding the north as it went by Too buring and too quick to hold Too lovely to be bought or sold Good only to make wishes on And then forever to be gone.

Love in my heart is a cry forever Lost as the swallow’s flight, Seeking for you and never, never Stilled by the stars at night.

I am the pool of gold When sunset burns and dies – You are my deepening skies; Give me your stars to hold.

Down the hill I went, and then, I forgot the ways of men, For night-scents, heady and damp and cool Wakened ecstasy.

