There Will Come Soft Rains

Despite her celebrity as one of her generation’s foremost poets and despite the renaissance in American women poets that defined the early decades of the 20th century, contemporary audiences have largely forgotten Sara Teasdale. To discover Teasdale’s poetry now is to explore a generation of American women poets summarily marginalized—most notably Edna St. Vincent Millay, Margaret Widdemer, Leonora Speyer, and Amy Lowell—who despite selling widely in their time, have become something of their own Lost Generation.

Influenced by the disciplined poetics and emotional themes of British poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti, and influenced by Emily Dickinson, Teasdale reflected the dominant characteristics of this generation of American women poets: conversational diction, a proclivity for the lyrical subtleties of rhyme and rhythm, and the confessional feeling of shared intimacy. At the turn of the century, Teasdale’s poems looked, sounded, and scanned like poems. However, against the emerging influence of the expatriate American Modernists—dominated by men poets like Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens—with their commitment to intellectualizing poetry and revolutionizing poetic forms by avant-garde experimentation in structure that alienated most lay readers but engaged the critical establishment, Teasdale and her generation of American women poets were ushered to the margins—their poetry dismissed as sentimental and derivative.