Poetry
Love Songs
Sara Teasdale · 1917
Synopsis
Seventy-one pieces in four sections, almost all rhymed, most of two or three quatrains. A woman tells what love gives and what it costs: the beauty that life puts up for sale, gifts and debts, the desire to lose oneself in the other. An interlude of songs born of grief separates the two main sections, and the volume reprints a good part of two earlier collections.
Context
The collection was published by Macmillan in September 1917 and reprints poems from Rivers to the Sea and from Helen of Troy. In 1918 it received the first annual prize of five hundred dollars from the Poetry Society of America, which Columbia University administered at the same time as the Pulitzer Prizes; the organisation of those prizes now counts it as the first Pulitzer for poetry, although that prize was only created in 1921 and first awarded in 1922. As early as 1922, Harriet Monroe disputed this attribution.
Who it is for
A collection of short pieces that can be read straight through. The simplicity is deliberate, and it long caused its author to be regarded as minor.
Prizes and reception
The first book of poetry that the Pulitzer Prize organisation recorded in its list of winners, under the name of the Columbia University prize.
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