Product Description
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Flowing "Rivers"
The tragic Sara Teasdale was one of the foremost female poets of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with her formal style and focus on romance. "Rivers To the Sea" is a solid collection of her work, and has many of her best-known love poems in it.

Although the early twentieth century saw the blossoming of the "new" poetry, Teasdale stuck to more formal prose: "The fountain shivers lightly in the rain/the laurels drip, the fading roses fall/the marble satyr plays a mournful strain/That leaves the rainy fragrance musical." Not terribly original in HOW it's written, but the rich language is all the more striking.

While Teasdale experimented late in her life, "Rivers to the Sea" mostly sticks to formal styles. Sometimes she did dense, intense, longer poems that seemed to have been written a long time ago. "Ah, Love there is no fleeing from thy might,/No lonely place where thou hast never trod,/No desert thou hast left uncarpeted/With flowers that spring beneath thy perfect feet."

But some of her poems are more like songs: "I am not yours, not lost in you,/Not lost, altho' I long to be/Lost as a candle lit at noon,/Lost as a snow-flake in the sea." In general, these ballads are much prettier and more accessable than the more intense and unstructured poems.

It's a sad irony that Teasdale wrote mostly romantic poetry -- very, VERY romantic poetry -- yet she never had a successful romance in her short life. Maybe that is why so many of her poems have a touch of fantasy about them -- it's the sort of love that reality might not be able to stand up to.

But she was obviously in love with love: "But oh, to him I loved/Who loved me not at all/I owe the little open gate/That led thru heaven's wall." Imagine having that written to you, or at least given to illustrate the feelings.Almost every poem in the eight books deals with romance, lovers, and how much she adored both.

In fact, after awhile it gets a little tedious; it would get dull if she didn't occasionally write about other things ("Oh when God made Italy he was gay and young!"). However, Teasdale's love poetry is extremely beautiful and richly written, so that it's hard not to get dewy-eyed when reading them individually.

Beautiful words and Italy are what "Rivers to the Sea" is made of. And Sara Teasdale's melancholy love poetry is definitely a must-read, for lovers of poetry, or just plain lovers. ... Read more

Product Description
Sara Teasdale (1884-1933) was an American lyrical poet. Teasdale's major themes were love, nature's beauty, and death, and her poems were much loved during the early 20th century. She won the annual prize of the Poetry Society of America for her volume, Love Songs. Her style and lyricism are well illustrated in her poem, Spring Night (1915), from that collection. She was influenced by the British poet Christina Rossetti. Teasdale was very much a product of her Victorian upbringing and was never able to experience in life the passion that she expressed in her poetry. A common urban legend surrounds Teasdale's 1933 suicide claims that her poem, I Shall Not Care was penned as a suicide note to a former lover. However, the poem was actually first published in her 1915 collection Rivers to the Sea, a full 18 years before her suicide. Her last collection of verse, Strange Victory, was published posthumously in 1933. Amongst her other works are Helen of Troy and Other Poems (1911), Love Songs (1917), Vignettes of Italy (1919) and Flame and Shadow (1920). ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Love for Sarah Teasdale
Sarah Teasdale has always been one of my favorite poets. This was the first book I bought containing her work, and I'm happy with it. Her poems are simple yet lovely. If you like poetry but Dickens types are a bit heavy for you, Teasdale is your girl.

Sara's Early Poems Of Love
Sara Teasdale's poetry is full of passion and emotion, and it speaks to the reader even today, so long after it was first published.It is sad that the very same passion undoubtedly led to her suicide in early 1933.She wrote mainly of love, nature, and death, but of course "Love Songs" which was published in 1917 focused on love, though the other major themes are sometimes also there.It was her third major work (4th overall as "Sonnets to Duse and Other Poems" from 1907 is difficult to find, unfortunately, and was not a major publication).

"Love Songs" is an unusual collection, as many of the poems are from "Helen of Troy and other Poems" and "Rivers to the Sea".Section one is mostly republished poems from these earlier works (although some of the poems have slight changes), and section three is half republished works and half new works.Sections two and four of the book are entirely new poems.This doesn't subtract from the overall impact of the work though, and this is certainly a collection worth seeking out for those who love early 20th century poetry.

This work was recognized in 1918 by the Columbia University Poetry Society (an award which was to become the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry just two years later) which was sponsored by The Poetry Society of America.Love played a major role in several of the Pulitzer works that year, as it is a significant factor in Ernest Poole's "His Family" which won the first Pulitzer for Novel (later changed to Fiction), and Jesse Lynch Williams' comedy "Why Marry?" (a.k.a. "And So They Got Married") which won the first Pulitzer for Drama.Pulitzer had not made a provision for awarding works of Poetry, so the first couple of awards were given by grants from the Poetry Society of America.

Though probably not her best work, "Love Songs" is still well worth seeking out.From the introduction, which is in and of itself a poem, to "A November Night", it is full of passion, whether it be the passion of new love, on-going love, or the loss of love, Sara Teasdale paints incredible pictures with her words.It would not be a proper review without a couple of examples:

The Look (first published in "Rivers to the Sea")

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.

To-night (first published in "Love Songs")

The moon is a curving flower of gold,
The sky is still and blue;
The moon was made for the sky to hold,
And I for you.

The moon is a flower without a stem,
The sky is luminous;
Eternity was made for them,
To-night for us.

I highly recommend "Love Songs", though I give this book only four-stars because her later works are even better.

prompt, & quality
we are very happy with the service we recieved it was prompt and the product was excellent

Lovely "Songs"
"But all remembered beauty is no more/Than a vague prelude to the thought of you," Sara Teasdale wrote at the beginning of "Love Songs." Since she wrote mostly love poetry over her lifetime, it's unsurprising that Teasdale devoted an entire book to her best work.

Aside from some new poems ("You smile at me/As though I were a little dreamy child/Behind whose eyes the fairies live..."), Teasdale included previous poems from "Rivers to the Sea" and "Helen of Troy and Other Poems." As a result, the poems vary wildly throughout the book. There is, however, one thing that all the poems have in common: Love.

Love as romance. Love as idealism. Love as passion. Love lost. Love spurned. Love in decline. Love gained. Love being enjoyed. Love as a memory. Love as a wild thrill, a comforting embrace, an all-consuming joy. It's a sad irony that Teasdale herself never had a really successful love affair; most of what she wrote was idealized romance.

In an era when poetry was being radically revamped, Teasdale generally stuck to Victorian poetry structures: simple rhyme schemes, rich phrasing, and a lot of nature descriptions, although in poems like "Summer Night, Riverside," she tried freestyle forms. Surprisingly, her style doesn't seem cloying except in odd spots.

There is one flaw: at times, Teasdale's lushly romantic sensibilities get overwhelming. It's a bit like reading the diary of a lovelorn Victorian teenager. However, taken in small doses, "Love Songs" reveals that Teasdale had a rare talent. "In the wild, soft summer darkness/How many and many a night we two together/Sat in the park and watched the Hudson/Wearing her lights like golden spangles/Glinting on black satin."

Lovers, romantics and fans of lush poetry will enjoy "Love Songs," which brings together many of the best of Teasdale's (many) love poems. Pretty, charming and well-written. ... Read more

Product Description
Sara Teasdale (August 8, 1884 – January 29, 1933), was an American lyrical poet. She was born Sarah Trevor Teasdale in St. Louis, Missouri.
... Read more

Customer Reviews (12)

Shadows suffusing the sweetness
Sara Teasdale ... the very name seems so genteel, doesn't it? And a cursory glance at her graceful, melodic poetry might easily reinforce that judgment. But for all its limpid beauty & lyric flow, her poetry runs far more deeply than that. Perhaps knowing that her all-too-short life ended in suicide will make the reader look a little more closely at her work.

Readers of Ray Bradbury will certainly recognize her name, as her poem "There Will Come Soft Rains" inspired the title of one of his finest short stories. An excerpt:

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.

Lovely, but also haunting. And as you read on, it becomes clear that her poetry was devoted to Beauty, to Love, and also to Death. There's a certain quiet resignation to her lines -- not so much despairing as accepting, as in "Winter Stars." An excerpt:

Years go, dreams go, and youth goes too,
The world's heart breaks beneath its wars,
All things are changed, save in the east
The faithful beauty of the stars.

Her final volume of poems was entitled "Strange Victory," and seems to presage the victory of Death over Life, as well as a private victory over whatever darkness enfolded the poet. Just look at "All That Was Mortal" to get a glimpse of her soul in those final days:

All that was mortal shall be burned away,
All that was mind shall have been put to sleep.
Only the spirit shall awake to say
What the deep says to the deep;
But for an instance, for it too is fleeting --
As on a field with new snow everywhere,
Footprints of birds record a brief alighting
In flight begun and ended in the air.

This sort of classic lyricism is out of favor these days, which is a shame, because there's something forever contemporary that underlies the period veneer of her work. Perhaps it strikes too close to the bone for some readers, who might prefer a bit of distancing irony -- this poetry is utterly sincere, and for all its seeming artifice, utterly naked. It's definitely in need of rediscovery by the discerning, sensitive reader -- most highly recommended!

NIce text, but no interactive table of contents
Finally a (more or less) complete collection of Teasdale's works, but this edition does not have a clickable table of contents.A note to DigiReads:is it really that hard to make an interactive table of contents?I can do it with Mobipocket Creator, why can't you?

Simply splendid lyric poetry
A highly popular American poet during at turn of the twentieth century, Teasdale is sadly becoming less and less read as time goes on. Regardless of her popularity, however, her poetry is among the most poignant in all English literature for me. Her sensuous yet traditional work is not difficult to understand, but is most striking and moving.

"Barter" from her 1917 Love Songs was the poem that inspired me to discover poetry many years ago, "Live has loveliness to sell,/All beautiful and splendid things,/Blue waves whitened on a cliff,/Soaring fire that sways and sings,/Children's faces looking up,/Holding wonder like a cup.<2 more stanzas>..."

Her major themes are love, death, and the beauty of nature. This Collected Poems includes selections from all her major works, but sadly fails to include many works, without explanation whatsoever. I find this extremely disturbing, along with the lack of foreword or editorial note. This is the only reason this collection receives a 4/5 instead of 5/5. Luckily for us, most of her work is available on public domain.

I feel that Teasdale is especially excellent for starting into poetry and is always a pleasure to read. Her work is not the most profound thing in the world, but that leads to relative ease of understanding and a beauty that can be enjoyed by all. I highly, highly recommend Teasdale to anyone getting started with poetry or just for a very enjoyable read. If you want to sample before you buy, much of her work is in public domain, and can be seen at that above link.

Teasdale is truly a great pleasure to read. Even if you don't buy the book, I highly urge you to read her work! It is incredibly beautiful.

Poetry for non-poetry people
A lovely collection of poems, all of which are easy to read and enjoy.Think of this volume as good way to begin to appreciate poetry. Most of the poems relate to the natural world. If you like Edna St. Vincent Millay, then you will like Sara Teasdale.

Missing poems
Teasdale's poems are lovely and this is a wonderful collection. However, it is not as complete as the title implies. There are several poems missing from the original manuscript of "Rivers To The Sea" and no foreword that explains their absence. I can only imagine that there have been similar omissions from the other manuscripts included in the collection. ... Read more

Product Description
This is an anthology of four collections of poetry by Sara Teasdale, a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet of the early 20th century. Love Songs, page 7Rivers to the Sea, page 41Flame and Shadow, page 99Helen of TroyAnd Other Poems, page 149 ... Read more

Product Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Product Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Product Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Unimpressed
I really want a Kindle edition of Teasdale's poetry, but this isn't it.The individual poems are there, but the formatting is awful and there is no clickable table of contents.Luckily I only downloaded the sample so I'm out nothing but my time.I'll keep looking for a better edition. ... Read more

Product Description
Helen of Troy

Wild flight on flight against the fading dawn The flames' red wings soar upward duskily. This is the funeral pyre and Troy is dead That sparkled so the day I saw it first, And darkened slowly after. I am she Who loves all beauty -- yet I wither it. Why have the high gods made me wreak their wrath -- Forever since my maidenhood to sow Sorrow and blood about me? Lo, they keep Their bitter care above me even now. It was the gods who led me to this lair, That tho' the burning winds should make me weak, They should not snatch the life from out my lips. Olympus let the other women die; They shall be quiet when the day is done And have no care to-morrow. Yet for me There is no rest. The gods are not so kind To her made half immortal like themselves. It is to you I owe the cruel gift, Leda, my mother, and the Swan, my sire, To you the beauty and to you the bale; For never woman born of man and maid Had wrought such havoc on the earth as I, Or troubled heaven with a sea of flame That climbed to touch the silent whirling stars And blotted out their brightness ere the dawn. Have I not made the world to weep enough? Give death to me. Yet life is more than death; How could I leave the sound of singing winds, The strong sweet scent that breathes from off the sea, Or shut my eyes forever to the spring? I will not give the grave my hands to hold, My shining hair to light oblivion. Have those who wander through the ways of death, The still wan fields Elysian, any love To lift their breasts with longing, any lips To thirst against the quiver of a kiss? Lo, I shall live to conquer Greece again, To make the people love, who hate me now. My dreams are over, I have ceased to cry Against the fate that made men love my mouth And left their spirits all too deaf to hear The little songs that echoed through my soul. I have no anger now. The dreams are done; Yet since the Greeks and Trojans would not see Aught but my body's fairness, till the end, In all the islands set in all the seas, And all the lands that lie beneath the sun, Till light turn darkness, and till time shall sleep, Men's lives shall waste with longing after me, For I shall be the sum of their desire, The whole of beauty, never seen again. And they shall stretch their arms and starting, wake With "Helen!" on their lips, and in their eyes The vision of me. Always I shall be Limned on the darkness like a shaft of light That glimmers and is gone. They shall behold Each one his dream that fashions me anew; -- With hair like lakes that glint beneath the stars Dark as sweet midnight, or with hair aglow Like burnished gold that still retains the fire. Yea, I shall haunt until the dusk of time The heavy eyelids filled with fleeting dreams.

Download Helen Of Troy And Other Poems Now! ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Those who love is worth reading.
I loved "those who love", it reached into your soul and makes you remember why you fell in love, alot of the poems in the books I've read in high school, but didn't know who wrote them, and now 20 years later, Ifound them in this book and I still remember them, they stay in your heartand you won't be the same after reading them ... Read more

Product Description
This volume is produced from digital images created through the University of Michigan University Library's preservation reformatting program. The Library seeks to preserve the intellectual content of items in a manner that facilitates and promotes a variety of uses. The digital reformatting process results in an electronic version of the text that can both be accessed online and used to create new print copies. This book and thousands of others can be found in the digital collections of the University of Michigan Library. The University Library also understands and values the utility of print, and makes reprints available through its Scholarly Publishing Office. ... Read more

Product Description
Originally published in 1917.This volume from the Cornell University Library's print collections was scanned on an APT BookScan and converted to JPG 2000 format by Kirtas Technologies.All titles scanned cover to cover and pages may include marks notations and other marginalia present in the original volume. ... Read more

Product Description
The Poetry of Sara Teasdale and Ella Wheeler Wilcox [Anthology] is a compilation of essential poetry by two prominent American poets of the early 20th century. Including:Sara TeasdaleLove SongsFlame and ShadowElla Wheeler WilcoxPoems of PassionPoems of Power ... Read more

Product Description
This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishings Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the worlds literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more