EXTENDING THE LINE: EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY  

AMERICAN WOMEN’S SONNETS 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

by 

 

ELEANOR GRACE WAKEFIELD 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A DISSERTATION 

 

Presented to the Department of English 

and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon 

in partial fulfillment of the requirements 

for the degree of 

Doctor of Philosophy  

 

June 2017 



 

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DISSERTATION APPROVAL PAGE 

 

Student: Eleanor Grace Wakefield 

 

Title: Extending the Line: Early Twentieth Century American Women’s Sonnets 

 

This dissertation has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the 

requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the Department of English by: 

 

Paul Peppis Chairperson 

John Gage Core Member 

Henry Wonham Core Member 

Veronica Alfano Core Member 

Helen Southworth Institutional Representative 

 

and 

 

Scott L. Pratt Dean of the Graduate School  

 

Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School. 

 

Degree awarded June 2017. 

  



 

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© 2017 Eleanor Grace Wakefield  

  



 

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DISSERTATION ABSTRACT 

 

Eleanor Grace Wakefield 

 

Doctor of Philosophy 

 

Department of English 

 

June 2017 

 

Title: Extending the Line: Early Twentieth Century American Women’s Sonnets 

 

 

This dissertation rereads sonnets by three crucial but misunderstood early 

twentieth-century women poets at the intersection of the study of American literary 

history and scholarship of the sonnet as a genre, exposing and correcting a problematic 

loss of nuance in both narratives. Genre scholarship of the sonnet rarely extends into the 

twentieth century, while early twentieth-century studies tend to focus on nontraditional 

poem types. But in fact, as I show, formal poetry, the sonnet in particular, engaged deeply 

with the contemporary social issues of the period, and proved especially useful for 

women writers to consider the ways their identities as women and poets functioned in a 

world that was changing rapidly. Using the sonnet’s dialectical form, which creates 

tension with an internal turn, and which engages inherently with its own history, these 

women writers demonstrated the enduring power of the sonnet as well as their own 

positions as women and poets. Tying together genre and period scholarship, my 

dissertation corrects misreadings of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sarah Teasdale, and Helene 

Johnson; of the period we often refer to as “modernism”; and of the sonnet form. 

 

 



 

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CURRICULUM VITAE 

 

NAME OF AUTHOR:  Eleanor Grace Wakefield 

 

 

GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: 

 

 University of Oregon, Eugene 

 Gonzaga University, Spokane 

 

 

 

DEGREES AWARDED: 

 

 Doctor of Philosophy, English, 2017, University of Oregon 

 Master of Arts, English, 2011, University of Oregon 

 Bachelor of Arts, English and Philosophy, 2007, Gonzaga University 

  

 

 

AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST: 

 

 Poetry and Poetics 

 Twentieth Century Poetry 

 Modernisms 

 African American Literature 

 American Literature 

 

 

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: 

 

 Graduate Employee, University of Oregon, 2010-present 

 

 Adjunct Instructor of Composition, Tacoma Community College, 2008, 2011, 

 2012 

 

Adjunct Instructor of Composition, Muckleshoot Tribal College, 2009 

 

 Research Assistant, Mary Moody Emerson Almanacks, 2011-2013 

  

Writing and English Tutor, U. Washington, Tacoma, 2009 

 

AP Literature Exam Reader, College Board, 2016-present 

 

 

 



 

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GRANTS, AWARDS, AND HONORS: 

 

 Fulbright Teaching Assistantship, Fulbright Commission, 2007-2008 

 

 Horn Travel Award, University of Oregon Department of English, 2015 

 

 

PUBLICATIONS: 

 

Wakefield, Eleanor. “Helene Johnson.” Scribner’s American Writers Series 

Supplement XXVI, 2016, pp. 163-76. 

 

 

 



 

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 

 

I would like to thank my committee first and foremost for their time, energy, and 

dedication during this dissertation writing process: Paul Peppis, Veronica Alfano, John 

Gage, Henry Wonham, and Helen Southworth. The years and hours Dr. Peppis especially 

has committed to this project have enabled me to grow as a writer, thinker, and scholar. I 

also owe thanks to Karen Ford and Corbett Upton, among many others in the department 

of English. Our department administrators Kathy Furrer and Mike Stamm also deserve 

unending praise for their diligent management of my progress and paperwork. 

For their consistent, cheerful, enthusiastic assistance analyzing and finding 

poems, I owe a debt of gratitude to the Modern and Contemporary Poetry Reading Group 

(MoCoPo): Paul Bellew, Jeni Rinner, Lizzy LeRud, Bill Fogarty, Rob Zandstra, Kate 

Huber, and others who so often let me select our readings so we could discuss Millay, 

Teasdale, and Johnson. Their insights have improved these interpretations immeasurably. 

My other tireless peers who worked with me and, often, listened to me when we ought to 

have been working, include Karl McKimpson, Meaghan Wetherell, Annie Caruso, Dina 

Muhic, and others. 

I would additionally like to thank Aletta Biersack and her dissertation workshop 

of 2016: Cary Fontana, Rose Maier, Anna Moore, Deb Parker, Rupa Pillai, Anna Sloan, 

and Rory Walsh. This group read more iterations of this dissertation than anyone else, 

and their feedback was both positive and valuable. More importantly, the camaraderie of 

this group consistently renewed my enthusiasm for my project. 

My parents, Catherine and Richard Wakefield, gave me a lifetime of support, 

encouragement, and assistance to try anything; without them, I am certain I would not be 



 

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here. My interest in poetry comes from my dad, whose commitments to literature and 

teaching have long guided me, and whose own work on Robert Frost inspired the initial 

version of this dissertation. My sister, Mary, and her husband Chris, have been tireless 

cheerleaders during this process, and their curiosity and enthusiasm for my work have 

been invaluable. 

Above all, I want to thank my husband, Dave Nyland. He has been by my side—

sometimes only figuratively—the entirety of my time in this doctoral program. I am 

motivated to work harder, be more thoughtful, and take more care because of him. I was 

able to spend these years thinking about poetry in large part because Dave committed 

himself so tirelessly to building our shared life: while I wrote my exams, he painted our 

apartment; while I worked on this dissertation, he single-handedly moved us; while I read 

poetry or revised conference papers, he made us meals, cleaned house, drove between 

Eugene and Portland, and much, much more. He only rarely helped me to interpret 

poems, but he has done almost everything else to make this possible. 

 

  



 

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To Dave 

and to my parents. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

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TABLE OF CONTENTS 

Chapter Page 

 

 

I. INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................... 1 

 The Pulitzer Prize in 1918...................................................................................... 6 

 Poetry at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century ................................................ 13 

 

 Women and Women’s Writing at the Turn of the Twentieth Century .................. 18 

 Chapters ................................................................................................................. 31 

II. SARA TEASDALE’S SONNETS TO DUSE AND THE VISION OF THE NEW 

WOMAN ................................................................................................................. 37 

 “To L.R.E.”: The Search for a Female Role Model ............................................... 44 

 Sonnets to Duse and Performing the Self .............................................................. 49 

 Poetic Role Models ................................................................................................ 66 

 Teasdale’s Poetic Self Fashioning ......................................................................... 83 

III. TIME IN SEQUENCE: EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY’S SONNETS OF 

MOURNING ......................................................................................................     109 

 The Ungrafted Tree Sonnets in Context ................................................................ 114 

 “I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed” and New Womanhood ........................ 128 

 Moderner Love....................................................................................................... 140 

 The Female Speaker and Cyclical Time ................................................................ 148 

 Gender in Sequence and Cycle .............................................................................. 167 

IV. “WAITING FOR THE LIGHT”: MULTIPLE IDENTITIES IN HELENE   

JOHNSON’S HARLEM RENAISSANCE SONNETS .......................................   197 

 Biographical Overview .......................................................................................... 204 

 “Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem” and Sonnets about Race....................................... 214 

 Christian Faith in “A Missionary” and “Magula” .................................................. 232 



 

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Chapter Page 

 Abstraction and Concreteness in Two “Sonnets” from Opportunity .....................  243 

V. CONCLUSION ....................................................................................................... 264 

REFERENCES CITED ................................................................................................ 268 

 Chapter I................................................................................................................. 268 

 Chapter II ............................................................................................................... 269 

 Chapter III .............................................................................................................. 270 

 Chapter IV ..............................................................................................................  272 

 



 

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LIST OF FIGURES 

 

Figure Page 

 

 

1. Eleonora Duse, photograph from Sara Teasdale’s  

 Sonnet to Duse and Other Poems .......................................................................... 51 

 

2. Eleonora Duse, from Teasdale’s book ................................................................... 54 

 

3. Eleonora Duse, from Teasdale’s book ................................................................... 55 

4. “Helene Johnson returns to Opportunity after a long absence. She is one of the 

younger Negro poets.” July 1930........................................................................... 245 

5. Original layout of “Sonnet [Wisdom may caution]” in Opportunity magazine. ... 251 

  



 

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LIST OF POEMS 

 

Poem Page 

 

CHAPTER II 

 

1. To L.R.E. ............................................................................................................... 44 

 

2. To Eleonora Duse [1] ............................................................................................. 58 

3. George Sand: A Recognition (Barrett Browning) ................................................. 75 

 

4. George Sand: A Desire (Barrett Browning)........................................................... 77 

5. To Eleonora Duse [2] ............................................................................................. 84 

6. To Eleonora Duse in “The Dead City” [3]............................................................. 97 

7. To a Picture of Eleonora Duse [7] .........................................................................  101 

8.   A Song to Eleonora Duse in “Francesca da Rimini”  ............................................ 107 

 

CHAPTER III 

9. Second Fig ............................................................................................................. 109 

10. I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed ................................................................. 128 

11. Modern Love I (Meredith) ..................................................................................... 141 

12. I [So she came back into his house again] ............................................................. 151 

13. IX [Not over-kind nor over-quick in study] ........................................................... 155 

14. X [She had forgotten how the August night] ......................................................... 163 

15. XIV [She had a horror he would die at night] ....................................................... 175 

 

CHAPTER IV 

16. My Race ................................................................................................................. 211 



 

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Poem ............................................................................................................................Page 

17. Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem ................................................................................. 219 

18. A Missionary Brings a Young Native to America ................................................. 236 

19. Sonnet [Be Not Averse to Beauty]......................................................................... 246 

20. Sonnet [Wisdom May Caution] ............................................................................. 252 

 

 



 

 

 

CHAPTER I 

INTRODUCTION 

If literary history cyclically represses and recovers works of the past to create a 

narrative to which readers can refer in shorthand, as Cary Nelson argues, we write now 

in a period eager to recover and include. In the 1990s scholars such as Nelson, Suzanne 

Clark, and Houston Baker brought renewed critical attention to the early twentieth 

century, whose middle-brow, women’s, and black writing had all been repressed in the 

middle of the century for various reasons, and persuasively demonstrated that these 

repressed works were not only worth reading, but that new readings treating these 

formerly repressed works as serious, literary, and important helped us to better 

understand the modernist period, poetry in general, and our own ways of reading 

mediated through received narratives of literary history. This process involved 

interrogating received values, questioning not only the story received in literature classes 

and books, but the terms used to tell that story; Clark’s canon-expanding 1991 book 

Sentimental Modernism reassesses “women writers whose [works] have shaped 

modernist and postmodernist history and whose ongoing attachment to and/or debt to the 

strong sentimental past and to sensibility itself reveals a contradiction within 

modernism, challenging our understanding of it, and indeed our own work” (5). Other 

critics advanced the same notion, demonstrating that far from a linear change from 

formal to vers libre poetry, the early twentieth century represented a wider range of 

poem types, authors, and ideas than had been commonly taught in literature courses or 

featured in anthologies during the middle of century.1 Including additional authors 

                                                 
1 Like Clark’s work, Bonnie Kime Scott’s The Gender of Modernism (1990) and Rita Felski’s The Gender 

of Modernity (1995) have changed the way scholars of the period conceive of women writers. 



 

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through canon expansion, which has often meant broadening the terms “modernist” and 

“modernism,” reintroduces important works to critical focus (Mao and Walkowitz). 

Now that Clark’s method has become common, we more often use the plural, referring 

to the cultural and literary movement that encompasses the early-twentieth century as a 

collection of “modernisms,” to indicate scholarship’s openness to taking seriously the 

multiplicity of ideas and styles that proliferated. In the past twenty-five years, 

international modernisms, women’s writing, the Harlem Renaissance, ethnic 

modernisms, and other categories of authorship along with genres including comic 

books, pulp novels, advertising copy, and more have been gathered under the umbrella 

of modernism; this expansive view of what voices and materials constitute the 

movement(s) has resulted in “modernism” referring to both a time period—the early 

twentieth century, broadly—and aesthetic tendencies.  

However, recuperation efforts of the early-twentieth century have failed so far to 

account for the enduringly popular sonnet, a genre which I show remains vitally relevant 

in the period, and serious readings of which contribute to the recovery of forgotten 

writers, repressed continuities between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the 

complication of—and better understanding of—literary history. This dissertation weaves 

together three strands of literary and cultural study to anchor and animate close readings 

of neglected sonnets: the long history of the sonnet; the short period of modernism or the 

early twentieth century; and women’s participation in society and art, including black 

women’s writing. These three strands have been discussed in various combinations 

previously,2 to the great benefit of literary and cultural studies. But analyzing the 

                                                 
2 Examples of work on women in and into the early twentieth century: Clark, Felski, Scott, Ammons, 

Nair, Walker, and others; sonnets in the early twentieth century: Maxson, Howarth, Burt and Mikics, 



 

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intersection of all three allows me to contextualize and illuminate understudied poems 

by women writers who were, at the time, popular and impactful.  

The early-twentieth century in poetry has been undergoing a reimagining for the 

past half century, now marked by studies of modernisms, popular modernisms, 

magazines and their networks of contributors, ephemera, pulp modernisms, and more.3 

Women writers have in many instances been recovered, added to the canon, along with 

writers of color, writers working on popular texts, and more. As part of the project of 

expansion, scholars of multiple modernisms have acknowledged that anthologies from 

the mid-century gave readers and the next generations of students a generalized, overly 

masculine view of the period: American poetry, like English poetry, was marked by 

alienation, formal radicalism, political and social upheaval, and the cold, hard thing. 

Poetry was not meant to comfort but to reinforce the cultural stresses the authors 

identified—the period saw poetry as a mirror held up to a society that had broken. This 

description of poetry and the Western world is not wrong, only too simple. For instance, 

a reaction against suffrage, women’s societies, the relative parity of women in 

education, and women’s literary production in the Progressive Era in part prompted this 

masculine conception of literature in 1920s, and of course women continued producing 

literary work even in the age of Pound and Faulkner, much of it overlooked in the 

cultural imaginary version of the period, and as a result “modernism” as a placeholder 

for the period. 

                                                 
Anthony Robinson, and others; women sonnet writers: Burt and Mikics, Natasha Distiller, Amy Billone, 

Diana E. Henderson, Daniel Robinson, and others. 
3 Clark, Baker, Mao and Walkowitz, Suzanne Churchill, Nelson, and others. 



 

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In addition to hiding the sexism that prompted this mid-century narrative of 

literary history, this version of the story erases the fin de siècle period, when, as I noted, 

women published many of the most important American novels of their time and when 

the authors of the next decades were educated. Thus, many readers take too literally 

Woolf’s claim that “On or about December 1910, human character changed.”4 Changes 

were certainly happening, but what came before 1910 contributed directly to what was 

possible in the 1910s-1930s, in culture and literature. Because particular sonnets 

reinhabit and refer to the form of previous sonnets (more on which later), they especially 

benefit from historical contextualization, in this case vis-a-vis previous sonnets and the 

various cultural conflicts before and during the 1910s-1930s that create tension in the 

poems I read in the following pages. Ignoring the continuities between the nineteenth 

and twentieth centuries in American and English poetries has allowed many prior 

historical studies of poetic forms to lapse at the turn of the century. The long study of the 

sonnet as a genre usually stops in the nineteenth century, a view that many of the 

Modernists encouraged: Howarth jokes in his essay on the modernist sonnet in the 

genre’s Cambridge Companion, “If the modernists had got their way, this book would 

have ended right here,” without anything about sonnets during the modern period (225). 

Finally, the simplified counting of important literature in the early-twentieth century 

overlooks many poets whose work was popular, important, and in some cases 

influential; more than that, it often requires ignoring the poetry itself in favor of period 

manifestoes and theories about how literature ought to be. Since the 1980s nuance has 

been added to that simple story in terms of types of work, variety of writers, and means 

                                                 
4 “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” Hogarth Press, 1924. 



 

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of publication, but much remains to be recovered. The studies of networks of poets and 

poetry magazines have revealed connections between poets even geographically far 

apart, often anchored by Poetry magazine editor and writer Harriet Monroe, and 

relationships of poetic discussion and editing that enriched or at least changed many 

poets’ works. Thus, the study of poets writing “traditional” poetry, those Monroe calls 

“rhymesters,” in the early-twentieth century is essential to understanding the evolution 

of poetry and poetics over time, to understanding the richness and diversity of the early-

twentieth century in poetry, and to correcting the overly rigid periodization that has 

characterized scholarship and academic study for the past seven decades. 

I begin this project with a story that this year marks the centennial of: the 

creation and awarding of the first Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, its adjudication, and the 

poetry-reading public’s response. The history of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry involves 

both personal and poetic relationships: people talking to each other about how they 

wanted poetry to endure and for whom. Unsurprisingly, it involves factions; though the 

absolute number of people fighting over the future of poetry was not large, their 

opinions were. I recount the establishment of the award to recast the time period, filling 

in missing pieces of readership and publishing issues most contemporary readers are 

unlikely to know, allowing me to present the rest of this project with this history in 

mind. It also introduces the poet who is the subject of my second chapter, Sara Teasdale. 

The cultural and literary context into which a young Teasdale entered shaped her work 

and her poetic concerns, namely finding a role model for her artistic ambitions as a 

woman, but it also sets the stage for the struggles, literary and cultural, that animate 



 

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Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poems, the subject of my third chapter, and Helene Johnson’s 

poems and ultimate retreat from literary life, the topic of my fourth chapter. 

The establishment of the Pulitzer Prize in poetry organizes important literary-

historical and cultural context, after which I discuss the larger history of early-twentieth 

century American poetry and poetic culture, and the cultural issues with which these 

women writers had to work. The description of each chapter follows these sections of 

history and context. The role and function of the sonnet both historically and specifically 

for the writers in this project is discussed in the chapters themselves, where the 

discussion of the specific deployment of the form can be connected to the poems in 

question. 

 

THE PULITZER PRIZE IN 1918 

Love Songs, by Sara Teasdale, published last year by the Macmillan 

Company, has been starred by a five hundred dollar prize, bestowed 

officially, from an anonymous donor, by Columbia University, at the 

same time that this institution awarded the Pulitzer prizes of a thousand 

dollars each for the best play, the best novel, the best editorial, and the 

best book of science, of the year 1917. Miss Teasdale’s—or rather Mrs. 

Filsinger’s—prize is for the best book of poetry published last year in this 

country by a citizen of the United States. (Monroe “Sara Teasdale’s 

Prize” 264) 

So begins Poetry editor Harriet Monroe’s consideration of the state of poetry the year 

prior, in the magazine’s August 1918 issue. Monroe was uniquely equipped to discuss 



 

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the wide-ranging field of poetry in the US, since in her capacity as editor of the 

century’s first magazine devoted specifically to verse she was a gatekeeper, deciding 

which poems the American reading public would encounter. The award that sparked her 

consideration, which we would now call simply the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, was then 

brand new; Sara Teasdale, a 32-year-old lyric poet from St. Louis, Missouri, was its first 

recipient. The other Pulitzer Prizes were first awarded in 1917, but not until the 

following year were supporters of poetry in America able to establish their own, similar 

prize, to be given to 1917’s best book of poetry. The $500 award was managed jointly 

by Columbia University and the Poetry Society of America and granted at the Pulitzer 

Prize ceremony; it was to be awarded to the “best book of poetry, the work of a citizen 

of the United States and published in 1917” (New York Times June 2, 1918). 

The award was one of several steps poetry had made toward a revival, necessary 

after many fallow years of poetic production and enthusiasm in the United States. The 

situation of American poetry in the first decade of the century was worrisome for the 

seemingly few people who were committed to its continuance, marked by back-page-

only publication in the popular magazines, few books of verse, and little to no possibility 

of a poet making a living at the art.5 In response, various individuals and groups tried in 

their own ways to establish a committed poetry-reading audience and to support the 

work of poets.  In the century’s second decade, a turnaround began with the work of two 

individuals, who set the stage for a larger poetic renaissance: William Stanley 

                                                 
5 Exact numbers are hard to find, but in multiple timelines of American literature I looked at, the number 

of “important” books of poetry from this decade are few: April Twilights by Willa Cather (1903); The 

Trees of Laughing Bells by Vachel Lindsay (1905); A Lume Spento (1908, published in Venice), Personae 

and Exultations (both 1909) by Ezra Pound. If there was not a decline in number of books, at least there is 

evidence for a dearth of poetry that even poets soon after would call “important,” or a failure of short-term 

preservation of what did exist. 



 

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Braithwaite, anthologist and editor, and Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry magazine, used 

collections with monetary prizes and a new magazine devoted specifically to poetry 

respectively to broaden access to verse. At the same time, Jessie B. Rittenhouse and 

Edward J. Wheeler succeeded in seeing their vision for a Poetry Society established—a 

group for all kinds of readers of poetry, not only for genteel members of the leisure 

class. This was important for widening the audience for poetry at the same time that it 

provided support for non-genteel poets. The group, founded in 1910, worked to promote 

poetry in various ways, including monetary awards for poets, to make it possible for 

more writers to pursue the craft. A major success in this effort was the establishment of 

the Pulitzer, then called, somewhat cumbersomely, the Columbia University-Poetry 

Society of America Prize.6 It used money left in the will of the publisher Joseph Pulitzer, 

like the other Pulitzer Prizes, but because Pulitzer’s will did not call for a poetry prize 

specifically, for the first years of the poetry prize’s existence, it was operated by 

Columbia University and judged by the Poetry Society of America (Fischer 3). 

Thereafter, the prize system was reorganized such that the poetry award, like all the 

others, was simply called the “Pulitzer Prize.” The first three years of Pulitzer Prize 

awards in poetry include the note that they were “made possible by a special grant from 

The Poetry Society” (pulitzer.org), but they include these early awards in their list of 

official Pulitzer Prizes in Poetry. 

As Monroe had announced, the prize’s first recipient was Sara Teasdale, whose 

Love Songs presented new and old poems from her then decade-long career, which had 

                                                 
6 For more on the establishment of literary prizes and their role in fostering the cultural prestige of 

literature, see James F. English’s The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of 

Cultural Value (2008). 



 

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by then included four books of her poetry and one edited collection, of poetry by 

women. Teasdale is little remembered today, but it would be difficult to overstate the 

popularity of Love Songs at the time: in her biography of Teasdale Margaret Haley 

Carpenter concludes that “[s]eldom has any book of poetry published in this country 

been accorded the honor and popularity this one received” (238). William Lyon Phelps, 

in “The Advance of Poetry in the Twentieth Century,” wrote, “Sara Teasdale has won 

her way to the front rank of living American poets. … Her work shows a combination of 

strength and grace that many a master might envy”; Padriac Colum in The New Republic 

declared, “This singer does not know how to be affected. The sincerity of her poems, 

their clearness and their intellectual level are related to a fine courage that is always 

present. It is delightful to get a book of poems that have come out of the heart” (both 

quoted in Rittenhouse 12). Louis Untermeyer’s review goes farther, effectively calling 

her one of the best women poets in English, and critiquing the habit some writers had 

developed of setting Teasdale’s work to music: “No woman in America (and only one in 

England) has voiced more plangently the delicate halflights and luminous backgrounds 

of passion. Sara Teasdale’s words will always suffer by being set to music. They are 

already music set to words” (quoted in Carpenter 238). Fueled by praise like this and the 

announcement of two major awards for the collection, more than five editions of Love 

Songs were published in 1918, and many more editions were published in the following 

years (Rittenhouse 6). 

Contemporary readers of the early twentieth century, hearing about the 

popularity of this volume and its historic status as the recipient of the first-ever Pulitzer 

Prize in poetry might be surprised to find rhyming lyric poems in the volume. Surely in 



 

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this decade that had begun with Imagism and Blast! magazine what was popular and 

lauded was formal innovation, the defying of convention, the wholly new. As Teasdale’s 

success suggests, this inherited story about early-twentieth century poetry is incomplete; 

while Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, H.D., Amy 

Lowell, e. e. cummings, and others like them were breaking the pentameter, they worked 

with and were published alongside Teasdale and other formalist poets like her. Indeed, 

the full picture of early-twentieth century poetry—writing, teaching, publishing, 

receiving awards, being discussed—would include a great deal more rhyming, fixed-

form verse than most readers today would anticipate. Naturally in the intervening 

decades we have had to rely on critics and anthologists and scholars to canonize the best 

of the period’s poetry, but the exclusion of formal verse from that subset of what existed 

at the time has been an oversight. At the time, free verse was not considered inherently 

“better” than formal verse, and I reject that assumption now, too. At the time, the major 

vehicle for poetry, Poetry magazine, equally considered old and new kinds of poems, 

which I show here to contextualize my recovery of these neglected poems.7 

Neither Poetry magazine as a collection of critical voices nor Harriet Monroe in 

particular were uncritical in their assessments of poetry, though; the magazine included, 

critiqued, and discussed various types of poetry and the relative merits of current 

tendencies in poetry with rigor, Teasdale’s prize-winning volume included. Monroe 

liked Love Songs, but she was committed to the professionalization of her art, and her 

editorial about the problems in the selection process for Love Songs goes on to argue 

that the judges of such an award ought to have been successful poets themselves:  

                                                 
7 The poems Teasdale won the Pulitzer for were primarily rhymed lyrics, not sonnets, but her prize for 

formal verse helps to establish the situation of poetry at the time. 



 

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Without disparaging the award, we must say a word about the committee, 

for questions of principle are involved. For thirty years, more or less, 

American painters, sculptors and architects have been fighting for the 

principle of professional juries in all competitions. A society which 

pretends to stand for the great art of poetry in this country should 

invariably adopt this rule; its prizes should represent the finished judgment 

of the most distinguished poets in its membership first. (264)  

The award committee, which in later years would include poets, Teasdale among them, 

consisted in 1918 of members of the Poetry Society who were not themselves primarily 

poets, such as Jessie Rittenhouse. (Monroe would critique their qualifications one by one 

later in the editorial.) 

Pursuant to her principled objection to the prize’s adjudication, Monroe helpfully 

offered her own assessment: “As for the award itself, the only way of forming an 

opinion is to examine the publishers’ lists for 1917. These disclose the following as the 

more important books of verse …—the possible competitors of Miss Teasdale’s Love 

Songs” (265). The list includes H. D’s Sea Garden as well as books by Edwin Arlington 

Robinson, Louis Untermeyer, Ezra Pound, Vachel Lindsay, and several poets less 

remembered. Monroe discusses the relative merits of her list, which totals twelve books 

besides Teasdale’s, weighing issues both technical—“aesthetic citizenship” versus legal 

American citizenship as a criteria, that is who counted as American enough to qualify 

for the prize—and aesthetic. Notably, she divides the “finalist” books into two 

categories with no evaluative judgment between them: “We are thus left with these two 

radicals—Mr. Pound and H. D.—and with Mr. Lindsay and Mr. [Orrick] Johns among 



 

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the rhymesters, as Sara Teasdale’s only serious competitors during the year 1917” (267). 

That is, while Monroe acknowledges that the “rhymesters” and the “radicals” or “vers-

librists” represent separate categories of poetry (and categories worth interrogating, as 

she dismisses two books off the long list by noting that they “might be challenged as 

poetic prose rather than free verse”), she does not dismiss either category as worthy of 

prize consideration. 

In 1918, a decade into poetry’s resurgence in general and the avant-garde’s 

domination of anthology space, rhymed, formal verse was in fact granted equal status 

within the contemporary poetic community. This unexpected fact, and Teasdale’s 

prominent role in the decidedly un-prominent side of the story of American poetry in the 

early twentieth century, motivates this study and anticipates its first chapter. Formal 

verse, the poetry of the “rhymesters” Monroe listed, occupies a limited space in 

discussions of the entire century, but especially in the first four decades, the long form 

of the period popularly referred to as “Modernism” (and the complications of using this 

term as a time marker do not escape me). As Monroe’s 1918 editorial, along with the 

archives of Poetry magazine, the sales of and critical praise for books of rhymed verse, 

and awards to “rhymesters” of all sorts, suggests, during this period many poets found 

inherited forms useful for creating complicated, rich, lovely verse that the public bought 

and praised. A full understanding of twentieth-century American verse must account for 

its stream of formalism, which was in the early part of the century popularly accepted as 

a critical and beloved part of the landscape. The formal verse of the time, moreover, 

adapted and evolved to engage critically with contemporary issues, demonstrating its 

vibrancy as a current way of writing, not merely a vestige of the poetic past. 



 

13 

 

Teasdale begins my investigation of the ways early twentieth-century American 

poets carried formal verse forward because of the puzzling contradiction indicated 

above: her near-universal popularity then and total unfamiliarity now. Moreover, I look 

at Teasdale as the first of three examples of “rhymester” female poets engaging with 

their contemporary world through the most prescribed of forms: the sonnet. Like the 

other poets this dissertation analyzes, Teasdale used the sonnet to test her conflicted 

feelings about her role in contemporary society; all three writers take advantage of the 

sonnet’s two-part structure and intricately woven pattern of rhyme and reference to set 

in tension ideas that seem opposed. What tensions these poets choose to string up this 

way, and what they do with that net once established, vary, but each of them 

demonstrates the continued power of the sonnet, not in spite of its historicity or its 

inherent self-reference, but because of those features. 

 

POETRY AT THE BEGINNING OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 

A full appreciation of the importance of Teasdale’s prize requires additional 

context about the problems the award sought to remedy. As noted, by the 1918 awards 

ceremony, Poetry and the Poetry Society had made advances in expanding the scope of 

poetry in audience and authorship; both were committed to a poetry reading audience 

and community of poets that was not limited to those wealthy enough to participate in 

the previous century’s genteel pursuit of the arts. The historical model of a genteel poet, 

who was able to sustain himself by writing (or attracting a patron to do so), was falling 

out of favor. But no reliable model for poets to earn a living by writing poetry had yet 

been established. The conflict between competing views of who ought to write poetry 



 

14 

 

was mirrored by a disagreement among the people attempting to found the Poetry 

Society of America about who ought to be in such a group: one wealthy couple, the 

Rices, who had helped to call the earliest meetings of what would become the Poetry 

Society, “saw poetry as a pleasing accouterment [sic] of a genteel existence, enjoyed 

privately among one’s social peers,” while Rittenhouse and Wheeler “had begun to 

envision a role for poetry within a national public culture” (Newcomb 13). As 

previously noted, this latter version partly succeeded, but not without friction.8 

The new, more democratic model of American poetry was unable to completely 

supplant the genteel tradition, and poets were not usually able, then as now, to be poets 

only or poets without family money;9 but the Poetry Society, Braithwaite’s anthologies, 

and Poetry were ushering in a massive cultural change nonetheless. The new prize 

money and increased opportunities for publication were positive for poetic culture 

moving into the 1910s, though they came too late for Teasdale’s first forays into the 

field. “Genteel” poetic culture allowed Teasdale her first access to publication, and 

despite all her sales and success through the 1920s and 1930s, she likely could not have 

continued if not for the money she and her husband had outside of those earnings; even 

after poetry’s renaissance after 1912, writing poetry was not terribly lucrative. When 

Teasdale was beginning to write at the turn of the century, many would-be poets like her 

were discouraged from their art by a lack of exposure to new poetry and by the 

                                                 
8 Some critics categorize the Poetry Society specifically was old fashioned, as it favored “pedestrian East 

Coast versifiers, few of whom would play even marginal roles in the New Verse except as foils against 

which avant-gardists might define themselves” (Newcomb 14) but this judgment is rooted in the same 

anthology-taught assumptions about verse that make Teasdale’s poems surprising to us today. 
9 I say “democratic” with Whitman in mind. Earle calls the “independence” of twentieth century poetry a 

result of “the liberating touch of Walt Whitman, sweet with robust optimism” (viii). Newcombe notes, 

however, that both advocates of maintaining the genteel model and proponents of making poetry more 

open claimed Whitman as their role model, though that was at least partly because of the dearth of other 

famous American poets to embrace (Chapter 1).  



 

15 

 

perception by publishers that poetry would not sell: “Aspiring poets of these years, 

knowing they could hope to see a volume of their work only by paying for it themselves, 

felt isolated and useless, actively discouraged from writing for anyone except their own 

closeted muses” (Newcombe 9). Teasdale’s parents funded the publication of her first 

book, Sonnets to Duse and Other Poems (1907). She was fortunate to enter the field as it 

underwent this massive change, represented for her most notably by her award. 

Reflecting on the changes in a 1923 comment for Poetry, Eunice Tietjens, writer and 

friend of Teasdale, reflected on how poetry had been before its revival in about 1912:  

Probably never in history has there been a more dramatic or more 

thorough revivifying of any art, both as to production and as to 

appreciation, than that which has taken place in the art of poetry in 

America during the last ten years or so. From rags to riches, from the 

menial ‘tail-piece,’ now almost forgotten, to the leading place in the 

‘regular’ magazines, from a minor to a major art form—such has been the 

progress of this Cinderella of the arts. (267)  

At the time that a young Teasdale was working on her little magazine The Potter’s 

Wheel (1904-1907) and the poems that would become Sonnets to Duse, the project of 

becoming a poet seemed likely futile, or at best destined to be a private undertaking, 

mostly for those who could already afford the hobby in both time and publishing fees. 

While genteel women learned arts, including poetry, drawing, painting, and music, in 

their homes for their own domestic entertainment, the opportunities for public 

participation in poetry were few, both because the community of poetry was difficult to 

identify and connect with and because the young woman’s potential role in said 



 

16 

 

community was not defined. But of course, as Tietjens’s reflection reveals, poetry was 

changing rapidly, and Teasdale herself would become part of that transformation. 

Poetry’s pre-Poetry fallow period merits a bit of qualifying, since all of 

American literature at the turn into the twentieth century has been overlooked by general 

tendencies in periodization. The simplest overview of American literature holds that the 

two major fertile periods were what Matthiessen called the “American Renaissance” in 

the middle of the nineteenth century and the Modernist period in the 1920s. While some 

worthwhile writers exist between those periods, the story goes, they have merited less 

study, fewer accolades, and have had less influence on the continuing narrative of 

American literature. In particular, the period between Realism (Dreiser, Norris, James, 

Crane) at the end of the nineteenth century and High Modernism (Faulkner, 

Hemingway, Fitzgerald) in the 1920s is often overlooked in the study of fiction 

(Ammons); in poetry the birth of Modernism is generally located earlier, with Poetry or 

World War I, but the common, simple conception still holds that this was a renaissance, 

either from nothingness or from literary work so outmoded as to be not worth 

discussing: “High modernism meant that the works of a few male writers stood for a 

whole period of literary history, with a definition of literature that would seal off the 

anarchic forces of the revolution of the word. It left women out of the literary canon” 

(Clark 35). This means that some work of the period suffers an erasure to fit that simple 

narrative, particularly work associated with women. Despite the tendency of 

periodization to suppress work that does not fit neatly into the categories, though, poetry 

publication around the turn of the century seems to be both limited and overlooked. 

Scholars of the novel, notably Ammons, have proved that its rich variety—and indeed 



 

17 

 

presence in the fin de siècle period, or what is sometimes called the Progressive Era—

was merely overlooked, in part because the most successful writers of novels at the time 

were women. But few scholars of poetry have made similar recoveries of large amounts 

of poetry completely neglected between Whitman and Pound. Though it is the case that 

recovery and reconsideration of texts has altered the landscape of literary study, indeed 

that “[o]ur literary past is very much a work still in progress,” most scholars work under 

the shadow of the periods and assumptions of the previous generation(s) (Nelson 

“Modern” 68). The contemporary perceptions of what periods were great (and abundant 

with literature that might be great) derive in large part from the anthology period of the 

mid-twentieth century, when the New Critics put male Modernists into the books that 

shaped a generation of literature scholars, as well as the professionalization of American 

literary studies, which came about along with the growth of colleges and a professional 

professoriate, in the beginning of the twentieth century (Ammons “Introduction”). These 

decisions, made primarily by men who judged each other to be more worth reading than 

their female, black, and otherwise “middlebrow” peers were, mean that the view reccent 

readers have of the past is far from representative of what was being written and read 

then. 

Many changes in culture and gender in America helped to contribute to the 

proliferation of well-known female novelists as well as the increased possibilities for 

women in public life and the arts while simultaneously laying the groundwork for the 

critical repression of some of that work. While it has historically been true that the 

reading public skews female, with the “institution of American literature at the 

university level … at the turn of the century” came a change of power to determine what 



 

18 

 

works mattered: this was now the job of university professors (Ammons 15). Though 

since the Civil War (white) women have entered the workforce in higher and higher 

numbers, and at the beginning of twentieth century as many women as men attended 

American universities, women did not see equality in literature any more than they saw 

it elsewhere. In fact, as Ammons cites, in 1909 a Modern Language Association meeting 

included an address fretting about whether too many women studying literature would 

make the field less appealing for men. But it was at least true that at the turn of the 

century middle-class women had unprecedented access to education, work, and civic 

engagement, creating fertile grounds for literary production. Though publication of 

poetry during the first decade of the twentieth century indeed seems to have been quite 

limited, in general and for women, fiction by women proliferated: among the most 

famous American women novelists of the time were Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Sarah 

Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Most of these women writers, 

like the poets I study here, struggled with the question of what it meant to be a woman 

and an artist, particularly in the face of rapid social change for women. So while female 

poets at the beginning of the twentieth century had a paucity of contemporary and 

homegrown models of poets and poetry to emulate or adapt, their literary engagement 

and work was a continuation of a rich tradition of popular, celebrated American 

women’s writing. 

 

WOMEN AND WOMEN’S WRITING AT THE TURN OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 

As suggested above, a ray of light in the dark years of poetry before 1912, during 

which Teasdale and Millay were becoming poets and Johnson was born and being 



 

19 

 

educated, was the relative literary parity of the women who were writing. That is, 

though there were no formal apparati for the sharing of poetry in America during that 

time and the magazines of the period featured little poetry, the work that did appear 

received equal consideration regardless of the author’s sex—though this was in part 

because poets, Teasdale included, were paying vanity presses to publish their work. 

However, evidence of this relative equity comes in the contents of December 1912’s The 

Lyric Year. This anthology of American poetry, assembled by editor Ferdinand Earle—

the culmination of a contest with $1000 in total prize money conceived as “an Annual 

Exhibition or Salon” of poetry “that would represent a fair cross-section of the nation’s 

poetry at a given moment, while also providing tangible incentives for poets”—

consisted of 100 poems by 100 poets, over 40 of whom were women (Earle; Newcombe 

14).10 Earle’s editor’s note calls attention to his inclusion of so many women in 

comparison to anthologies from previous centuries, while also noting that “current verse 

is more masculine” (vii-viii). He also characterizes the century’s poetry reflected in his 

anthology as “democratic, scientific, humane.” The poems selected were, as the 

anthology’s title suggests, primarily lyrics, mostly not sonnets, so whether women were 

regularly inhabiting and adapting the space of the sonnet itself is not revealed in this 

particular collection. But since The Lyric Year provided the primary access to the variety 

of the year’s “best” poetry in 1912, and since other avenues for accessing new poetry 

were then so limited, it is safe to think that outside the famous nineteenth century poets 

she read and the work of her peers and their teachers, Teasdale, the oldest of the women 

I discuss, was not exposed to large numbers of contemporary female poets who could 

                                                 
10 The other two prize judges of The Lyric Year were Wheeler, of the Poetry Society, and Braithwaite. 

Earle chose as his top choice for best poem Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Renascence.” 



 

20 

 

provide a model for her. The need for a model of the female artist animates Teasdale’s 

earliest sonnets. This context helps to illustrate specifically Teasdale’s struggle in the 

poems I read in chapter 2, but also lays the groundwork for the cultural and social 

situation in which Millay began writing and that Johnson would enter later. 

Beginning before and extending after this lull in poetic publication in the US, 

American culture experienced a dramatic change in the roles and expectations for 

women, characterized retrospectively as a major period of feminist activity. Women’s 

activists most famously worked at the turn of the century toward suffrage, resulting in 

the ratification of the nineteenth amendment to the US Constitution in 1920. But the 

cultural changes were broader and more complicated at the time. As is generally the case 

with cultural movements, there was no one answer to what women wanted as society 

evolved—ever faster, it seemed, in the wake of the industrial revolution and seismic 

shifts in scientific understandings of the world, as religion ebbed in the national 

consciousness, as people moved to cities at unprecedented rates, and more. The Civil 

War had given white, middle-class women opportunities to work outside the home, and 

many had continued to be socially active afterward, laying the groundwork for the 

feminist and anti-racist groups of the later nineteenth century and the movements toward 

suffrage and temperance. The nineteenth century model for white women had been the 

“true woman,” a moral paragon and example for her family and community, but of 

course women of color could not participate in that vision of womanhood. Thus, black 

women’s groups and white women’s groups diverged in their self-definition: white 

women sought to change societal expectations about work outside the home and sexual 

mores, but women of color more commonly had to work away from their children and 



 

21 

 

have often been stereotyped as sexually immoral. Indeed, the movement for white 

women to work outside their homes then (as now) relies on women of color or poorer 

white immigrant women to maintain domestic order. Teasdale and Millay are exemplars 

of women adapting to these changes, whereas in Johnson’s career we see the differences 

wealth and race make in the possibility of artistic production, even at a time of 

unprecedented social movement for women. 

Even within the same racial or class categories, “women” were a diverse group 

with varied objectives, but a new option for imagining womanhood emerged in the 

1890s that would be foundational for women’s engagement in society and with art: “The 

New Woman.” The new woman was a cultural conception of new possibilities for 

existing as a woman, not necessarily rejecting assumptions and expectations imposed on 

women historically but expanding the range of options available: a woman could 

maintain her home and family while also serving on committees or marching for 

suffrage. However, the cultural pressure to be both feminine and ambitious for some 

women resulted in a “double bind”—a limiting situation where the two goals were 

perceived as mutually exclusive. Indeed, even today traits associated with ambition tend 

to be perceived as masculine, and, more practically, artistic and career ambition is made 

easier with a spouse at home tending to the family; these problems were worse a century 

ago. So for Teasdale, Millay, and Johnson, how being an artist, much less a poet, 

comported with being a woman even under the emergent model of new womanhood was 

not yet clearly established. In their poems, we see them take up this issue in various 

ways, and we see the effects of these cultural considerations in their career decisions as 

well. 



 

22 

 

The term the “New Woman” first appeared in writer Sarah Grand’s “The New 

Aspect of the Woman Question” in 1894 (North American Review): “Both the cow-

woman [domestic cattle] and the scum-woman [women who use men] are well within 

the range of comprehension of the Bawling Brotherhood,” her term in this essay for men 

who complain about women wanting to change their situations, “but the new woman is a 

little above him, and ... at last she solved the problem and proclaimed for herself what 

was wrong with Home-is-the-Woman’s-Sphere, and prescribed the remedy” (271). 

Though the other types of woman—“cow-woman” and “scum-woman” are clearly 

indicated as titles, in this case “new woman” is just a way of differentiating, and it is 

worth noting women are described in relation to men in all three cases and specifically 

described as they would appear to men. These “new women” stood apart from men, 

judging their ability to manage society; they were freshly enlightened about the ills of 

society, many as an extension of men. Grand’s essay engages in the same false humility 

for male readers that so much of women’s literature has done for centuries: she 

acknowledges that women are partly at fault for society’s current condition because they 

“have allowed [men] to arrange the whole social system and manage or mismanage it all 

these ages without ever seriously examining his work with a view to considering 

whether his abilities and his motives were sufficiently good to qualify him for the task” 

(271). While the essay takes men to task for suppressing women, it, in the voice of a 

woman, pretends to accept at least half of the blame for not speaking up sooner. 

Rhetorically, she seeks to engage men in the process of carving out new space and 

possibilities for (certain) women. Not all activists would have agreed with Grand’s 

rhetorical method, but her terminology made possible a more organized reaction against 



 

23 

 

the “True Woman” of the previous century. The major definition of “new woman” 

supplied by Grand correlates to a new kind of man; by reassessing societal relationships, 

women can be and do more. Grand suggests, “[t]he man of the future will be better, 

while the woman will be stronger and wiser” (272). That is, both sexes will reevaluate 

their relationships to make the best for both. Though Grand’s essay is tonally also either 

mean or playful toward men, this initial definition still puts a name to an important shift. 

She identified a noticeable change in society, which was permitting women to do more, 

often not under the careful guidance of their fathers and husbands but on their own. 

This movement was far from universal, of course, and the reaction against it in 

part contributed to the hyperbolically masculine characterization of the literary scene in 

the 1920s; indeed, both men and women argued against the new woman and against 

women’s expanded roles more broadly. Famously, many women were opposed to 

suffrage (and many white women were opposed to including women of color in their 

cause), for various reasons, many of which recalled the true woman—a model of 

femininity at which many women had excelled and thrived. Morality and Christian 

sentiment had been powerful rhetorical tools in America since its inception, and 

women’s use of home and family as arguments to society at large have tended to be used 

to persuasive effect, notably including Uncle Tom’s Cabin and other anti-slavery texts 

that appealed to Christian family values using the characteristics of Christian sentiment 

common in the sentimental novel of the early- and mid-nineteenth century.11 Anti-

suffrage activists argued that giving women the vote meant “diverting the attention of 

woman from her natural duties [which would be] a direct loss to the State” (The Case 

                                                 
11 In this way, some conservative white women might have found themselves aligned with activist black 

women in embracing the true woman ideal. 



 

24 

 

against Woman Suffrage 5, emphasis in original). Women’s lower social status (or lower 

public status and lack of authority in many domains of household and family 

management) was often justified, by writers of both sexes, using rhetoric claiming that 

women were “better” and “higher” than men in morals and virtue: “We did believe, of 

course, in our hearts that women in public life would purify politics and would make for 

a higher moral and political standard” (Mrs. R. C. Campbell quoted in The Case against 

Woman Suffrage 13). Due to women’s elevated morality and public life’s (i.e., men’s) 

crudeness, women’s participation in public life would be stressful, stultifying, and 

degrading. 

These arguments against suffrage align with one of the biggest problems of the 

new woman that Teasdale, Millay, and Johnson wrestle with in their poems: women 

have assigned duties as it is, and no element of expanding their rights and opportunities 

involves reassigning their existing responsibilities. Wealthy women might be able to 

afford domestic help, but working class women, who were granted rights and duties—

and suffrage was explicitly framed as a duty—outside the home in the public sphere, 

remained responsible for cleaning, cooking, childrearing, and so on. Women, 

historically, have kept the domestic space operational, which division of labor has 

allowed men to go out into public life:  

[H]istorically men and women have played very different parts in each 

others’ lives. Where woman has been a luxury for man, and has served as 

the painter’s model and the poet’s muse, but also as comforter, nurse, 

cook, bearer of his seed, secretarial assistant, and copyist of manuscripts, 

man has played a quite different role for the female artist. (Rich 13) 



 

25 

 

For Teasdale in particular a man provided the financial stability she needed to be an 

artist, but for women writers in general their obligations to the men in their domestic 

lives—or children, as in the case of Johnson—conflicted with artistic ambition. 

Class, indeed, divided women as much as differences of opinion vis a vis 

participation in political life. As noted, the calculus in all arenas differed for wealthy 

women, whose household obligations were lessened by the ability to hire other women 

to perform their domestic tasks. Thus, many of the most vocal women on all sides of 

debates of the day were wealthy, because they had the time and space to participate in 

these discussions in person and in writing. Though women share many elements of a 

forced narrative, or Clark’s “unwarranted discourse,” wealth, race, religion, ability, and 

other factors differentiated their mobility within it. Indeed, many women of means 

opposed suffrage for class reasons: “to give women the suffrage would only increase the 

ignorant vote and bring refined women into contact with an element that should not be 

brought into their lives” (New York Times 1894).12 This argument closely mirrors the 

one about who ought to be able to access poetry, as members of the would-be Poetry 

Society attempted to define and revive their genre for a new century. Despite decades of 

American literary life dominated by the masculine cry for “democracy” and freedom (of 

verse form, of life), actually emulating Whitman did not feature as a stated goal for the 

groups of poetry writers, editors, and enthusiasts trying to build an institution to support 

and encourage American poetry. That is, many members of the literary circles 

attempting to revivify poetry thought keeping the existing barriers in place, such as the 

                                                 
12 For more on women against women’s suffrage, see Susan Goodier’s No Votes for Women: The New 

York State Anti-Suffrage Movement (2013) and Susan E. Marshall’s Splintered Sisterhood: Gender and 

Class in the Campaign against Woman Suffrage (1997). 



 

26 

 

tendency for books to be published by vanity presses paid for by the poets, was a 

benefit, excluding “ignorant” participants and keeping “refined” readers and writers 

separate, to borrow the language of the anti-suffrage argument. The fear of engagement 

with the wide variety of the American populace, women, people of color, and the 

working poor included, underpinned many social debates particularly as transportation 

and communication had increased so dramatically in the past century,13 making more 

people figuratively closer to each other, and as people increasingly flocked to urban 

centers, making them literally closer. 

Retrospectively, the invention of the new woman as a cultural concept did not 

fundamentally change the roles of women in society; rather, it made possible limited 

social mobility for certain kinds of women. The new woman “stood for the middle- to 

upper-middle-class woman’s evolutionary progress toward modernity and, in particular, 

her movement from the home to the public sphere” (Todd 2). And of course, that 

presupposes white women. This movement did not appear out of thin air; instead, the 

leisure class of politically- and socially-engaged women from the mid-to-late 1800s 

introduced their daughters into institutions and habits that made way for a larger cultural 

recognition of their new roles. Initially these shifts related to educational opportunities 

and community leadership positions: “Thanks to the establishment of women’s colleges, 

these young women received a higher education in the 1870s and 1880s and pursued 

careers as teachers, social reformers, health experts, writers, artists, and physicians in the 

years up to the First World War” (Todd 2). Many of these roles were still nurturing 

                                                 
13 The railroad and telegraph brought the most radical changes to the previous century, while the turn into 

the twentieth century brought the automobile, radio, telephone, airplane, and more, all of which 

dramatically altered human perceptions of distance. 



 

27 

 

roles, but they might include work for the community more broadly than one’s own 

family: “These women, like their mothers, adhered to the values of community service 

rooted in small-town America and concentrated their efforts on social justice, world 

peace, and remedying the ills of industrializing cities.” Such women saw community 

engagement not as a continuation of progress but as a reaction against the problems of 

the changing world. And indeed, some women were able to blend conceptions of the 

true woman with activism and engagement: “In such activities and in their campaigns 

for suffrage many first-generation new women retained ideals of female virtue and 

nurturance from earlier decades, making a place for themselves in the political arena as 

the nation’s caretakers, its guardians of spiritual resources” (ibid). The new woman, 

however she was framed, was thus not free from gender expectations; she simply 

expanded what was possible for and expected of women. Women and men were 

generally still considered fundamentally, inherently distinct, with distinct roles even in 

public sector work and activism. Woman’s association with the domestic space has 

relegated much of her literary and artistic work to that sphere as well: her work is always 

partial, limited in scope, suitable for other women but not men, who are an impartial, 

universal audience. 

The white new woman underlies the conflicts at the heart of Teasdale’s and 

Millay’s sonnets: for Teasdale in Sonnets to Duse, admiring a new woman while also 

being in some ways conservative, resisting the oncoming social tendencies, meant that in 

her earliest published sonnets her sense of self as an artist was nascent and depended 

heavily on a muse or role model who could help her develop a voice; for Millay in 

Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree, the freedoms of modernity did not seem to extend into 



 

28 

 

marriage, and her speaker struggles to be both an individual self and a wife within the 

space of the sonnet. This manifests differently for Johnson, for personal and cultural 

reasons. As women are subject to the “unwarranted discourse,” black people are subject 

to a similar set of cultural expectations imposed upon them to which they respond in 

various ways.14 Johnson’s relationship to faith connects to the struggles of black women 

a generation before her to be considered morally upright; while their white peers wanted 

more sexual freedom, black women often sought to prove that they were not sexually 

“free” or promiscuous. Thus, black families’ investment in producing children who are 

morally correct, often grounded in Christianity, can be seen in part as a response to a 

culture that refuses to judge black people on the same criteria as white people.15 Johnson 

takes up issues of propriety playfully in some of her non-sonnet poems, but the structure 

of the sonnet allows her to grapple with the more painful issues of faith, blackness, and 

womanhood.  

Later, the movement of the new woman would come to encompass greater 

sexual freedom, reproductive rights, suffrage, new fashions (the flapper is an evolution 

of the new woman), and more, but its prominence at the turn of the century was certainly 

aided by its presence in literature, most notably the novels of Henry James and the plays 

of Henrik Ibsen. These writers embraced new ways of writing women, contributing to 

the public visibility of the new woman, especially among the educated, literary class.  

                                                 
14 For more, see Frantz Fanon’s “The Fact of Blackness” (1952). 
15 Ammons notes well the ways racism manifested during the women’s movements of the turn into the 

twentieth century, differentiating the strategies of white and black women even as women’s equality and 

freedom were their shared goals; Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me while not religious in 

focus takes up the challenge for black people and parents in particular today. 



 

29 

 

But women writers also contributed to enriching the possible models of being a 

woman, not only by creating female characters who were self-confident, motivated, and 

bold outside the confines of traditional marriages, but also by engaging with issues of 

woman-as-artist. Even today stereotypes of femininity are at odds with the traits 

perceived necessary for success in most high-profile fields, business, art, and 

entrepreneurship among them. Culturally, we still tend to associate genius and 

leadership with masculine tendencies, a century after these three women were working. 

But at the turn into the twentieth century, the issue of woman-as-artist vexed ambitious 

women writers even more. Though wealthy women learned to paint and draw from 

tutors as one of many domestic traits that made them attractive wives, and some women 

even found work as teachers of art or as copyists, the opportunity to be a creative artist 

on one’s own was limited (Ammons). Women were by and large not considered capable 

of artistic genius—they could emulate or teach but not create something innovative or 

interesting. Compounding this perceptual problem, the demands of marriage and 

motherhood limited the opportunities for even the most talented women; Ammons 

examines seventeen Progressive Era novelists in her study, noting that the most 

successful of them either did not marry, were married only briefly, or published 

primarily before their marriages. Further, most of these successful Progressive Era 

novelists were not mothers. This pattern is replicated in the careers of the women in my 

study: Teasdale’s husband’s wealth made much of her later career possible, but his 

absence and their subsequent divorce obviated much of the labor of marriage; Millay 

married late and did not have children; and the pressures of single motherhood after her 

divorce pushed Johnson out of publishing after a relatively short career. Ammons 



 

30 

 

focuses specifically on the female Kunstlerroman to show that Progressive Era women 

novelists were engaged directly in writing into the literary record new possibilities for 

the female artist and thereby establishing themselves as artists, not just domestic 

writers—the “artist” being the higher category than domestic writer, copyist, teacher, or 

dilettante. As my examinations of Teasdale, Millay, and Johnson will show, they, too, 

were deeply engaged in the issue of female writer as artist, and, as I will argue, the 

sonnet form itself inherently thematized the artist’s struggle. 

The race and class differences among my chosen poets might raise the question 

of the value of reading them together. I do not argue that sex or gender essentially unite 

all women, but the cultural conception of womanhood does bear, to a greater or lesser 

degree, on all women who present as such. Though they vary in age, location, family 

history, opinions, goals, ideals, religion, race, class, and more, “What they share is 

gender; historical moment; somewhat more tenuously, language […]; and even more 

tenuously, nationality” (Donovan 233). More to the point that these poets engage with, 

“Women are alike by being the subject of an unwarranted discourse” (Clark 12). That is 

to say, the cultural expectations put on women limit and affect everyone living under 

that system. The cultural expectation that an artist cannot be a woman affects even 

women who proudly claim to be artists. Sexist and racist realities of publishing, 

networking, and being taken seriously upon publication all affect most women writers, 

though these three succeeded in publishing excellent work. Studying women together 

also counters historical trends in studying men exclusively; Ammons cautions against 

studies of women writers becoming “ghettoized,” limiting women’s work to discussions 

of women writers as women specifically and not taking them seriously as universal or 



 

31 

 

impartial writers. But as she seeks to in her study, I also seek to address a dearth of work 

on these important women writers who all engage deeply with issues of gender and are 

affected by issues of gender. Reading several women whose responses to their cultural 

circumstances vary, also enriches the conception of women writers in general and their 

time period. Reading women writers seriously critiques the still-present cultural image 

of “woman” as a single category based on “the notion of an essentialist subject, the 

mistaken idea that women are all alike” (Clark 12). So I take up these women writers 

carefully, in the context of multiplicities of women’s concerns and priorities of their 

time periods and the ones that shaped them as they grew up and established themselves 

as poets, without attempting to make claims about all women writers, all women sonnet 

writers, or all women in the early twentieth century. Rather, my readings of these 

sonnets establish the varied possibilities of the sonnet to engage with irresolvable 

questions of personal and poetic identity, elements of which are shared across these 

distinct and distinctive sonnets. These women, born at roughly decade intervals from the 

1880s to 1900s, and their poems, taken from the 1900s and 1920s at different stages of 

their careers, are meant to highlight the possibilities the sonnet form provides for 

engaging with those problems of the self, particularly in this period when the role of 

women writers was changing so rapidly. 

 

CHAPTERS 

Chapter 2 analyzes Teasdale’s sonnet sequence to the celebrated actress Eleonora 

Duse. Teasdale’s sequence Sonnets to Duse (1907) owes a great deal to Elizabeth Barrett 

Browning’s sequence to George Sand (1844); both twist the gendered expectation of the 



 

32 

 

romantic sonnet celebrating a beautiful and famous woman, and, in extending their 

commentaries from single sonnets into sequences, they complicate their initial claims 

about identity, femininity, the role of the author, the function of the poem as a public 

document. Teasdale adapts the acceptable subjects for honorific verse to include popular 

culture, a new kind of celebrity just then coming to exist; the distinctly contemporary 

public figure of Eleonora Duse directly challenged accepted beliefs about femininity, 

identity, and performance, while Teasdale’s series of meditations on her persona 

challenge the traditional blazon and romantic sequence and explore Duse as an object of 

public desire. While a “traditional” sonnet objectifies a woman’s beauty, inventorying 

her assets, Teasdale’s sequence allows a female speaker and writer to simultaneously 

participate in and critique this poetic history. My reading of Teasdale’s version of a love 

sequence casts new light on the history of love sequences, the relationship between 

speaker and object, and the nature of public identity in the early twentieth century. 

Positioning this chapter on Teasdale’s sequence next to the chapter on Millay’s 

illuminates their similarities in invoking the past and differences in their use of form and 

treatment of the subject. These radically different ways of discussing love, and radically 

different loves, represent changes in relationships and gender conventions during the 

period, demonstrating how these two modern sonneteers used an enduring form to 

question the possibility of endurance for received notions of romantic love. 

Engaging with nineteenth-century predecessors, Millay like Teasdale revises the 

sonnet sequence to address her contemporary cultural context. Because sonnet 

sequences are usually not included in full in later anthologies, their complete structure 

and original historical allusions are often overlooked as well as the particular poems that 



 

33 

 

constitute them; I work toward remedying this oversight by comparing Teasdale’s and 

Millay’s sequences to their direct predecessors, highlighting the line of inheritance as 

well as the unique and culturally specific conflicts Teasdale’s and Millay’s sequences 

take up. The sonnet sequence, unlike sequential quatrains or heroic couplets, generally 

does not move into narrative. Instead, interrelated mediative lyrics on a single subject or 

group of closely related subjects tend to comprise sonnet sequences, from Petrarch 

through the early twentieth century. The two-part form of both Petrarchan and 

Shakespearian sonnets allows a speaker to inhabit two views in the same mind, and the 

sonnet sequence provides further means for speakers to inhabit multiple positions; in the 

early twentieth century, modern sonnet writers reworked the sonnet sequence, 

questioning and commenting on received notions of gender, subjectivity, and reality 

much like the modernists did in other poetic forms. These chapters use Millay and 

Teasdale, both popular, famous poets of their time, and both of whom wrote sonnets 

individually and in sequence, to show the unique possibilities of the sonnet sequence for 

the fragmentary, questioning cultural context of early twentieth-century America. Both 

sonnet sequences I analyze adapt flexibly to contemporary questions while invoking 

sequences of the previous century to heighten their arguments; having a stronger power 

of reference than a single sonnet because of their lengthened form and relative rarity, the 

sonnet sequence is able to extend the historical/contemporary arguments made in single 

sonnets. 

The focus of Chapter 3, Millay’s 1923 sonnet sequence Sonnets from an 

Ungrafted Tree adapts several formal elements of George Meredith’s famous 1862 

sequence Modern Love, including variations in line length borrowed from his elongated 



 

34 

 

sonnets (sixteen lines each) and perspective (her poems are in the third person from the 

perspective of the wife in a failing marriage; his vary but often take a similar subject 

position); in so doing, Millay reworks Meredith’s vision of marriage and love to include 

the perspective of a wife who is not a mother. Millay’s sequence does not make a single 

argument about marriage in general or the subject’s specific marriage, but rather 

considers multiple visions—snapshots—of a scene of death and ending to offer no 

definitive conclusions about contemporary womanhood. Meredith more than Millay fills 

his sonnets with descriptions of the person the “speaker” (or view taken by the third-

person narrator) feels disconnected from, whereas Millay’s speaker only mentions her 

spouse in passing, making the female speaker neither object nor objectifier; both 

sequences thereby reverse expectation, substituting for unfulfilled, idealizing love the 

sad, un-ideal fulfillment of love that has become unhappy marriage. Millay writes 

around the dying husband, focusing attention on nearly everything but him and the 

couple’s lost child. In the face of death, the speaker sees renewal and new life, but also 

loss and lost potential. The sonnet sequence extends the images of a single sonnet and 

allows Millay to comment on the role of time as both linear and cyclical; as life is, so 

too is poetic tradition linear and cyclical, as this sequence demonstrates. Using Meredith 

so deliberately as a thematic and formal model allows Millay to experiment within 

established tradition (extending her lines as Meredith extended his poems), granting her 

more freedom to break with the dominant tradition in form and perspective. 

Chapter 4 studies neglected Harlem Renaissance poet Helene Johnson (1906-

1995). Johnson never published a book of her own poetry; in fact, her poems, which 

vary in structure and topic, appeared in literary magazines for about ten years before she 



 

35 

 

stopped publishing (and responding to interview requests.) As a result of her short 

career, compounded by her lack of self-promotion, readers and editors scarcely 

remember her today. Johnson began her publishing career as the winner of a contest in 

the Harlem Renaissance magazine Opportunity in 1925, which resulted in the 1926 

publication of six of her poems; interestingly, one of the judges of that contest deeming 

her a true talent, was Robert Frost himself (Mitchell 16). She was also published in 

Fire!!, the avant-garde magazine of the “younger negro artists” (1926). The following 

year her poem “Bottled,” for which she is now best known, appeared in Vanity Fair. She 

continued publishing in magazines until 1937 and continued writing until her death in 

1995, but remained little known or studied. Throughout her career, she published only a 

few sonnets, and like Frost she returned to the form periodically but not consistently. 

Her work helps to illuminate the varied ways the early century sonneteers were 

deploying the genre, enhancing our readings of both authors and the form itself. By 

reading Johnson’s sonnets in the intersecting histories of early-twentieth-century 

American poetry, the continued vibrancy of the sonnet form, and the flourishing of black 

literary culture especially in little magazines, I unearth and clarify her contribution to all 

three of those stories.  

My studies draw multiple lines from the sonnet’s history into a period better 

known for free verse in America, reconsidering now-overlooked authors in the context 

of genre studies. The previous dearth of such studies has allowed a century of 

misreadings of these poets and others who continued to use the sonnet form, a 

misunderstanding of the modernist period in literature as more disruptive from its 

immediate past than it really was, and the exclusion of great poems and poets from 



 

36 

 

textbooks, syllabi, and conference programs. In applying accepted views of sonnet 

studies to a period from which they have been excluded, my dissertation enriches both 

fields and lays the groundwork for further work on the early twentieth century sonnet, 

by these and other authors. 



 

37 

 

CHAPTER II 

SARA TEASDALE’S SONNETS TO DUSE AS A 

VISION OF THE NEW WOMAN 

This chapter is the first of three analyses of how the sonnet form found purchase 

in the early twentieth century as a staging ground, or a stage, for personal identity 

conflicts specifically rooted in the same contemporary issues dealt with by other, less 

“traditional” poets: gender and sexuality, the role of art, the relationship between faith 

and science, race, class, and the self in all these changing contexts. I argue that the 

sonnet’s arguments often hinge on temporariness; their “resolutions” (often achieved in 

the sestet) are frequently illusory or conditional, and rereading reveals their weaknesses, 

thus heightening the effect of the original conflict or implicit duality—which is just as 

often a multiplicity of subject positions, not just two. The dual issues of time and space 

in the sonnet are not entirely new, but I link them to discuss the logical possibilities of 

the poem form in this time period and offer readings of neglected poems, making my 

contribution one to both formal scholarship and author scholarship. 

In addition, this chapter offers a recovery of a lost poet, the then-famous lyricist 

Sara Teasdale. Celebrating Teasdale’s poetic accomplishment, as I did in the 

Introduction, contributes to demonstrating that these sonnet writers are worth recovering 

and studying as formalists: in the early-twentieth century, writers, editors, and the 

reading public were more diverse in their reading tastes than many readers now assume. 

The narrative of Modernism was established in the mid-twentieth century through 

editorial decisions in creating the popular anthologies of the preceding decades, and in 

turn trends in scholarship affected what was taught to the next generations of literary 



 

38 

 

scholars, leading to a loss of at least half—if not much more—of the poetry published, 

read, awarded, and discussed in the first four decades of the twentieth century. Today, 

scholars are critiquing this conventional narrative and complicating it: renewed interest 

in women’s writing, ethnic American writing, international literary production, along 

with the middlebrow, magazines, the pulp, and more all lay the foundation for my work, 

revealing the ways the authors I study were deeply embedded in literary and cultural life 

at the time. Teasdale’s early work reveals one approach emerging poetic talents took to 

engage with literary history in the context of rapid social change, using it to both test 

poetic skill and question the possibility of inhabiting the form—of the sonnet, of the new 

woman, of the artist—which demonstrates the continued usefulness of the sonnet form. 

A decade before her award for Love Songs, Teasdale published Sonnets to Duse 

and Other Poems (1907), her first collection, which puts into conversation her varied 

views on women in poetry (and the arts more generally) and women artists. Lacking 

current examples in poetry of how to be a “new woman” and how to inhabit a public, 

performing identity as the speaking subject, Teasdale turned to historical models, like 

Helen of Troy and Sappho (whom she imagined to suit her needs), as well as 

contemporary actresses, Duse primary among them. In a similar way, she looked to one 

of the previous century’s most famous poets, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and her 

sonnets wrestling with poetic and female identity: the George Sand sonnets. Sonnets to 

Duse and Other Poems features, most notably, an eight-sonnet sequence to the Italian 

actress Eleonora Duse, as well as poems to Sappho, one a sonnet and one sonnet-like, 



 

39 

 

and a sonnet to Teasdale’s teacher, Lillie Rose Ernst.16 These sonnets are written by a 

young writer embarking on a career, establishing a new identity; but they take the form 

of the past. To the limited extent that Teasdale is studied, it is not for these poems in this 

early volume, so their analysis doubly rectifies a historical problem in the study of 

American verse, the effects of which are a singular story about a multivocal period and 

the loss of this significant poetry from the current consciousness.  

Sonnets to Duse and Other Poems states clearly its project: to introduce a new 

poetic voice through poems about relationships to other artists, and the sonnet functions 

to emphasize the poet’s relationship to the history of its art form. By couching her own 

identity in terms of other identities, Teasdale both claims similarity to these esteemed 

role models and feigns modesty through distancing her art from the quality of theirs. 

Understanding the ways Teasdale struggles with establishing her poetic identity through 

the sonnet form itself requires a consideration of the sonnet’s history, specifically Paul 

Oppenheimer’s history of the sonnet as the first personal poetic genre and Jennifer Ann 

Wagner’s history of the sonnet as a “moment’s monument,” or a form that exists in 

space and time. In occupying private but shared space and recursive time that is 

simultaneously temporary, the sonnet is itself experienced in contradictions.  

While some summaries of the form assert that it “resolves” its conflicts or 

“tensions” in its sestet, I argue that in these poems Teasdale does not find resolution, 

though she searches for it. Ultimately, in these poems, identity is not knowable, and the 

                                                 
16

 I analyze mainly poems that are clearly sonnets, but occasionally I look at poems I call “sonnet-like”; 

by this I mean that understanding its form through the lens of the sonnet, analyzing it in relation to the 

sonnet, helps us to understand the poem specifically and the author’s use of form in a useful way. 



 

40 

 

speaker’s descriptions of Duse’s self-veiling and performing also apply to the poet 

herself.  

Poetic identity is contingent, bound to a historical moment, often tentative, and a 

performance for a specific audience, and Teasdale uses these poems both to reflect on 

and create a poetic identity that responds to these general concerns while also 

negotiating the role of the female artist in her historical situation. Teasdale biographer 

William Drake characterizes her use female figures as a kind of hero-worship:  

The central figures in Sara’s youthful literary imagination were all 

women—strikingly beautiful, but the victims of sexual tragedy because 

of their appeal to men—Helen, Sappho, Guenevere, Eleonora Duse. ‘I 

think that I am far more likely to idealize women than men,’ she wrote 

[her friend John Myers] O’Hara. ‘I should like to know a woman who is 

all that I should love to be myself.’ (24) 

But instead of mere hero-worship, I show that these poems display through tensions that 

are not ultimately resolved the conflict present in the early-twentieth century about what 

a woman could be, both in life and as an artist, and especially as a new poet establishing 

herself. Though Teasdale would later dismiss these poems as “girlish” in their evidently 

straightforward admiration for the actress, more evidence Drake uses to dismiss them, in 

their praise they also yet reveal conflict, confusion, and the desire to know more than is 

ultimately knowable—about Duse and the speaker/poet herself. Teasdale’s Sonnets to 

Duse and selected other sonnets use the sonnet form to argue three things: that gender is 

a performance; that poetry is a way of performing, generally and gender-specifically; 

and that perhaps the only possible resolution to the conflict, for people who are ill at 



 

41 

 

ease with the idea that identity might not exist, is analogy (being like what came before 

you). She looks to Duse as a muse (a generative source of inspiration), a role model (an 

exemplary artist to emulate), and a Petrarchan beloved (an archetype to fill a role in the 

poem) to weave together multiple threads of poetic history, from the Greek to the Italian 

to the Victorian, and ultimately to conclude that her poetic ability might not be 

commensurate to Duse’s—or, perhaps, that there is no Duse for her poetry to capture, 

because her art, too, is artifice.  

Though I focus on the sonnets, Sonnets to Duse contains a variety of poem types, 

including lyrics like the ones for which Teasdale would become most famous; many of 

these non-sonnets take up similar themes, to which I refer where relevant to my 

argument about the function of the sonnets. In addition to the sonnet, Teasdale 

experimented with other inherited forms, writing children’s rhymes, lyrics with ballad 

influences, and a variation on the French form the triolet. These poems were not granted 

much attention even upon their publication in 1907, though they are rich in meaning and 

ripe for further study. My chapter goes against critical consensus in this focus, because 

then and throughout her career Teasdale was known as a lyricist, not a writer of sonnets. 

For instance, Arthur Symons, literary critic in England, reviewed the book for the 

London Saturday Review, with particular praise for the lyrics:  

In this little American book there is poetry, a voice singing to itself and to 

a great woman, a woman’s homage to Eleanora Duse. The sonnets to 

Madame Duse are hardly the best part of the book, for they speak and the 

lyrics sing; but they speak with a reverence which is filled with both 

tenderness and just admiration. … The book is a small, delightful thing, 



 

42 

 

which one is not tempted to say much about, but to welcome. (Quoted in 

Rittenhouse 4) 

Here, the sonnets are fine and with a fine subject, but are not what makes the work most 

compelling. Biographer Drake, too, thinks Teasdale came more into her own throughout 

her career, as she set aside imitating others (first directly, translating the Germans, then 

by taking up common subjects and forms as in “Guenevere” and the Duse sonnets), 

eventually coming into her own lyric voice. Notably, even this most famous of the 

“rhymesters” was better known for her least-formal rhyming verses.  

I strive not to make these readings biographical, though some details about 

Teasdale do influence my interpretations of these poems, most notably her age and the 

stage of her career. I do not claim that she wrote after the model of Barrett Browning or 

Wroth, but these poets are direct or indirect role models nearly as much as Duse is, 

because the history of the sonnet and the nature of poetic education at Teasdale’s time 

would mean that these issues of female identity and poetics were known to the audience 

and author (and speaker) through these earlier poems. I treat the speaker as closely 

analogous to Teasdale, but instances of demonstrable distance between the two add 

another layer of performance and persona that contributes to the speaker’s anxiety about 

authentic identity and ways of being in the world. Personally, I suspect that Teasdale 

was herself anxious about how to enter into this form and career, and that anxiety 

contributes to any slippage between author and speaker in which I engage in this section, 

but most simply it is the case that this book and these sonnets take up a persona, carried 

throughout many different poems, of an emerging artist unsure of her identity and trying 

to establish it through poetry, facts true of Teasdale as well. Poetry is a way of writing a 



 

43 

 

self, temporarily constructing one version of self-consciousness; Oppenheimer notes that 

Yeats once said that in revising his poems he revised himself, which in this context 

speaks to the power of the poet and the troubling (for some) lack of a “real” object to 

which to refer in the sonnet (Birth 32). Teasdale is constructing a new version of herself, 

a female poet, just as she is writing a version of Duse that the woman Eleonora Duse 

would likely not recognize. The layers of construction in these poems attempt to build 

identities but ultimately suggest such an endeavor may be futile. They make enduring 

one attempt at reconciling the conflicted desires, values, and beliefs of their writer, an 

attempt facilitated by a form that suggests logical and historical relationships between its 

parts; thus the sonnet’s versions of the self are already contextualized through the 

history of the form, even if they are also of their time.  

These poems appear to be about an actress the poet admired, but in fact they are 

about a new poet stepping into the public, declaring herself to be someone, even if that 

“someone” is not a unified whole but a series of uncertainties. By writing in the original 

“personal” poetic form, Teasdale’s voice is filtered through a history of individuals 

staging identity conflicts through a “silent” form of poetry. Unlike Duse, Teasdale does 

not speak aloud to a collective audience through her art. The sonnet originated along 

with silent reading, and rewards private reflection (on the parts of reader and author). 

Thus, Oppenheimer argues, the sonnet stages internal conflict and was the first poem 

form to be “personal” in this way.17 The Duse sonnets are “about” Duse, but they are 

also about Sara Teasdale’s attempts to write her way into a legible identity, as Petrarch’s 

                                                 
17 Other poems can also provide the space to work through personal identity conflicts, but those were 

through creative uses of existing forms, whereas this form was created in a way that not only allows but 

enhances these themes. See Oppenheimer “Introduction” for more on silent reading specifically. 



 

44 

 

sonnets reveal more about Petrarch than his beloved; they allow Teasdale’s speaker to 

work out conflicts she had about being a woman and poet, to reconcile silence and 

poetic speaking. In each of these ways—silence and voice, expectations of women 

historically and as Teasdale wrote, and the various ways those conflict—the sonnet’s 

rich history and unique form deepen the palette available to Teasdale in these poems. 

 

“TO L.R.E.”: THE SEARCH FOR A FEMALE ROLE MODEL 

As Teasdale searched for a “guardian angel” in Duse, she also looked to other 

women, including her teacher. This poem to Lillie Rose Ernst raises some of the same 

issues as the Duse poems: the difficulty of knowing a role model or other person, the 

desire for a role model, and the usefulness of the sonnet to stand on its own while also 

harkening to the poetic past. 

To L. R. E. 

When first I saw you — felt you take my hand, 

I could not speak for happiness to find 

How more than all they said your heart was kind, 

How strong you were, and quick to understand — 

I dared not say: “I who am least of those 

Who call you friend — I love you, and I crave 

A little love that I may be more brave 

Because one watches me who cares and knows.” 

So, silent, long ago I used to look 

High up along the shelves at one great book, 



 

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And longed to see its contents, childishwise, 

And now I know it for my Poet’s own, — 

So sometime shall I know you and be known, 

And looking upward, I shall find your eyes. 

   (Sonnets to Duse 25) 

The speaker’s voice is silenced in awe of her role model’s presence, which suggests her 

poetic abilities, too, are muted by the pressure of emulating her forebear. Additionally, 

the speaker’s inability to fully see or understand what is concealed from her—in this 

case “one great book” (10)—leads her to reflect on her ability to know more generally. 

Here, and in the Duse sonnets, this unknowability leads to reflections on time and 

memory; some things, like exposu