Rivers to the Sea

(Hardback)

Available Formats

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Rivers to the Sea (1915) is a poetry collection by Sara Teasdale. The poets third collection, published several years before she was awarded the 1918 Pulitzer Prize, is a masterful collection of lyric poems meditating on life, romance, and the natural world. Somber and celebratory, symbolic and grounded in experience, Rivers to the Sea revels in the mystery of existence itself. The park is filled with night and fog, / The veils are drawn about the world, / The drowsy lights along the paths / Are dim and pearled. Spring Night, the collections opening poem, begins in quiet reverie, its speaker appreciating the beauty and mystery of a silent world while suffering from heartache and uncertainty: Oh, is it not enough to be / Here with this beauty over me / My throat should ache with praise, and I / Should kneel in joy beneath the sky. / Oh, beauty are you not enough A lyric poet to her core, Teasdale explores the highs and lows of love in her own life and in the lives of strangers. Personal and communal, public and private, her work is a testament to a life spent in observance. For Teasdale, a poet who merges an abiding affection for flora and fauna with a critical distance from human affairs, the belief in the life of the world, with or without us, is enough. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Sara Teasdales Rivers to the Sea is a classic work of American poetry reimagined for modern readers.

Author Bio

Sara Teasdale (1884-1933) was an American poet. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Teasdale suffered from poor health as a child before entering school at the age of ten. In 1904, after graduating from Hosmer Hall, Teasdale joined the group of female artists known as The Potters, who published The Potters Wheel, a monthly literary and visual arts magazine, from 1904 to 1907. With her first two collectionsSonnets to Duse and Other Poems (1907) and Helen of Troy and Other Poems (1911)Teasdale earned a reputation as a gifted lyric poet from critics and readers alike. In 1916, following the publication of her bestselling Rivers to the Sea (1915), she moved to New York City with her husband Ernst Filsinger. There, she won the 1918 Pulitzer Prize for Love Songs (1917), her fourth collection. Frustrated with Filsingers prolonged absences while traveling for work, she divorced him in 1929 and moved to another apartment in the Upper West Side. Renewing her friendship with poet Vachel Lindsay, she continued to write and publish poems until her death by suicide in 1933.