My presentation is on Sara Teasdale’s poem called Union square. Beginning off, I just want to a say a little biography about Sara Teasdale that I found very interesting. She wrote a quite number of poems that were based in New York locations place such as Riverside Park, Union Square, and 42nd street. As a young girl, Teasdale and caught diseases easily. For most of her life, she had a nurse who took care of her. Because she was so sickly, she was homeschooled until she was nine. She never had communication with her peers. As a result, she was forced to entertain herself with stories and things that she made up in her own world. When Teasdale was ten, she had the first communication with her peers at school. When she was fourteen she began to put the thoughts and dreams that amused her and wrote that on paper and that is when she wrote her first poem.
She was never able to experience in life the passion that she expressed in her poetry. She was not happy in her marriage, and she divorced Filsinger in 1929 even though he didn’t want to. But in 1933, Teasdale caught chronic pneumonia and it weakened her not only in body but also in mind and spirit. No longer able to see the beauty in simple things, Teasdale committed suicide at age 48. The reason I wanted to notify you guys of her biography because her poems are based on her life. It shows how even though she was isolated, she had such great poems. How can an isolated girl write such great poems about New York? It goes to show you how writing is a way that writers express fantasies or ideas they cannot resemble in real life. Since, she got sick and it affected her mind, she was not able to see the beauty in the world, so she committed suicide. It depicts the idea of how much writing about New York meant to her and what is the point of writing if you cannot fully see New York as it is.
The poem I picked was Union Square by Sara Teasdale mostly because I believe it resonates with her and the reason she wrote this poem because she felt that she could not attract a man’s love. She uses the verses“With the man I love who loves me not,” “I leaned to catch the words…. “The words my heart was calling,” (Teasdale, 408). It shows how she wants to tell her lover she likes him but she cannot. Then she shows a depiction of her jealous of girls who are brave enough to flaunt to guys their sexuality without caring about the consequences, when she states, “But oh, the girls who can ask for love in the lights of Union Square. We often see guys as aggressive in this society but she was jealous of the girls who would take the first step. This was the first time she wrote this poem directly from her voice. This was the first act of boldness in writing in 1911. In today’s society, do you think women’s roles have changed as in, are they more open to going up to a guy first?
