Sara Teasdale was born in St. Louis to a good family. She was very well educated in private schools, and traveled extensively, including frequent trips to Chicago where she became part of Harriet Monroe's Poetry magazine circle. This may not mean much to readers today, but in Teasdale's time this was the top of the heap for a young poetess. She was exhuberantly courted and proposed to by Vachel Lindsay, one of the most dashing and exciting of America's poets duirng that period (whose work I featured in these pages two weeks ago). In 1917, she became the first person to win a Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

She corresonded for many years with Aline Kilmer, the widowed wife of the poet Alfred Joyce Kilmer ("I think that I shall never see A poem lovely as a tree . . ."), who died in France while fighting in World War I. Many of her letters to Ms. Kilmer came from vacation sites in Santa Barbara, California; Nahant, Massachuesettes; Ogunquit-by-the-Sea, Maine; Paris, France; and London, England, as well as from her home in New York City.

And yet, despite this life of prosperity, travel and literary success, she was, by all accounts, a solitary figure, who was deeply unhappy in her marriage to St. Louis businessman Ernst Filsinger. In 1929, she obtained a divorce, against the wishes of her husband, went into virtual seclusion in her apartment in New York, and in 1933 committed suicide, one year and one month after her friend and former suitor Vachel Lindsay took his own life.

As might be expected from a poet of Ms. Teasdale's stature, I had many wonderful poems from which to choose, so many in fact that I couldn't possibly settle on one. I chose "The Solitary" because I believe it explains a great deal about the author's troubled life. I chose "The Long Hill" because Ms. Teasdale clearly drew inspiration for it from another of my favorite poems, Christina Rossetti's "Amor Mundi," which was one of my early poem-a-week picks and can be found here on my website.