Helen of Troy and Other Poems

Book excerpt: Helen of Troy and Other Poems (1911) is a poetry collection by Sara Teasdale. The poet’s second 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, Helen of Troy and Other Poems revels in the mystery of existence itself. “Wild flight on flight against the fading dawn / The flames' red wings soar upward duskily. / This is the funeral pyre and Troy is dead / That sparkled so the day I saw it first, / And darkened slowly after. I am she / Who loves all beauty—yet I wither it.” As Troy burns, Teasdale imagines an impassioned monologue given from the ramparts by the infamous Helen, whose faithlessness in marriage was the catalyst for war in Homer’s Iliad. Although she is often seen as a minor character, more an object of male desire than an autonomous subject in her own right, Teasdale refuses to follow the template passed down by generations of poets—mostly men. Her Helen is meditative and intelligent, capable of immense sorrow and full-throated rage alike: “Men’s lives shall waste with longing after me, / For I shall be the sum of their desire, / The whole of beauty, never seen again.” While acknowledging her role in Troy’s destruction, Helen is a tragic figure in Teasdale’s poem, a woman who never asked for beauty, let alone for the troubles that beauty brought down on the world. Containing monologue poems from such figures as Sappho, Beatrice, and Guenevere, alongside a series of love poems and finely-crafted sonnets, Helen of Troy and Other Poems is a brilliant collection by a gifted American poet. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Sara Teasdale’s Helen of Troy and Other Poems is a classic work of American poetry reimagined for modern readers.