Biography of twentieth-century poet Sara Teasdale, drawing from personal papers that had been withheld from publication for nearly fifty years after her death to reconstruct her tragic history, and including samples of her poetry and prose.

Rivers to the Sea (1915) is a poetry collection by Sara Teasdale. The poet’s third collection, published several years before she was awarded the 1918 Pulitzer Prize, is a masterful collection of lyric poems meditating on life, romance, and the natural world. Somber and celebratory, symbolic and grounded in experience, Rivers to the Sea revels in the mystery of existence itself. “The park is filled with night and fog, / The veils are drawn about the world, / The drowsy lights along the paths / Are dim and pearled.” “Spring Night,” the collection’s opening poem, begins in quiet reverie, its speaker appreciating the beauty and mystery of a silent world while suffering from heartache and uncertainty: “Oh, is it not enough to be / Here with this beauty over me? / My throat should ache with praise, and I / Should kneel in joy beneath the sky. / Oh, beauty are you not enough?” A lyric poet to her core, Teasdale explores the highs and lows of love in her own life and in the lives of strangers. Personal and communal, public and private, her work is a testament to a life spent in observance. For Teasdale, a poet who merges an abiding affection for flora and fauna with a critical distance from human affairs, the belief in the life of the world, with or without us, is enough. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Sara Teasdale’s Rivers to the Sea is a classic work of American poetry reimagined for modern readers.

Pulitzer Prize winner Sylvia Plath’s complete poetic works, edited and introduced by Ted Hughes. By the time of her death on 11, February 1963, Sylvia Plath had written a large bulk of poetry. To my knowledge, she never scrapped any of her poetic efforts. With one or two exceptions, she brought every piece she worked on to some final form acceptable to her, rejecting at most the odd verse, or a false head or a false tail. Her attitude to her verse was artisan-like: if she couldn’t get a table out of the material, she was quite happy to get a chair, or even a toy. The end product for her was not so much a successful poem, as something that had temporarily exhausted her ingenuity. So this book contains not merely what verse she saved, but—after 1956—all she wrote. — Ted Hughes, from the Introduction