TEASDALE, Sara.

£3,750 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Sonnets to Duse and other Poems. First edition, inscribed by the poet on the front free endpaper, "To Miss Curtis, with love from Sara Teasdale, Cromwell 1908". A romantic poem copied in Teasdale's hand is laid in, signed "H. G. C. [Helen Gardner Curtis] from S. T. J." and dated 10 May 1909. Inspired by the Italian actress Eleanor Duse, the volume was Teasdale's first full-length publication.The inserted poem is ascribed to Charles Hanson Towne and includes the lines "Love is to suffer day on endless day... Of this great martyrdom that hangs o'er me / Is sweet because I bear it all for her". On the verso is a line from Teasdale's poem "Sappho", first published in her 1911 Helen of Troy, and Other Poems. On the same day Teasdale presented Curtis with the Towne poem, Curtis noted in her diary that "Sara says she has at last found a name for me: Harriet the Heartbreaker" (Perry and Sagoff, p. 106). Teasdale also wrote her St. Louis address on the rear endpaper, and five clippings of Teasdale's poems are loosely inserted, dated in Curtis's hand from 1908 to September 1909.Teasdale and Curtis were both patients at the Cromwell Hall sanatorium when they met in 1908. Curtis's diaries describe their intense friendship, detailing private picnics, long conversations about "books and music and love" (Perry and Sagoff, p. 104), and a fancy dress party that they attended as a bride and groom. Teasdale first left Cromwell in July 1908, shortly after she gifted this volume to Curtis, but re

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