Sara Teasdale was an American poet who lived in New York.

 

Sara suffered from poor health and didn't start school until she was 14.

 

1911-1913 Teasdale was courted by two men, Vachel Lindsay and Ernst Filsinger. Vachel Lindsay was a famous poet, and he fell in love with her but she chose to marry Ernst Filsinger instead. They married in 1914.

 

The following year they moved to New York and New York became her home for the rest of her life. She continue to have a platonic but close friendship with Lindsay and some of his poems are written to Sara Teasdale. He also wrote her daily letters.

 

The marriage with Filsinger was unhappy and she moved out of their home for 3 months, which was the criteria for divorce and divorced him against his will in 1929.

After the divorce she moved back to New York and renewed her friendship with 

Lindsay who was now married with children.

 

One morning on the 29th of January 1933 she took an overdose of sleeping pills in her apartment, and lay down in the bath and died. Lindsay had committed suicide 

two years before.

 

Her poems tells stories about happiness, love and the deepest pain, desparation and sadness all mixed up together. She seemed to want to be so completely in love that her self dissappeard, but with that kind of love comes a price to pay and that price is the undertone in her poetry.

 

I wanted to hear her voice or soul inte the songs and I have tried to let her poems speak for themselves but I have decided to let the music reflect her destiny. Even when she wrote about true happiness there is a dark undertone of sorrow and desperation.

 

She won several awards for her poetry. In the year of 1918 she won a Pulitzer Prize for her poetry collection Love songs. The five poems  in this song cycle is from Love Songs.