BarterBy Sara Teasdale

Life has loveliness to sell,all beautiful and splendid things,

Blue waves whitened on a cliff.Soaring fire that sways and sings.

And children’s faces looking upHolding wonder like a cup

Life has loveliness to sell,Music like a curve of gold,

Scent of pine trees in the rain,

Eyes that love you, arms that hold

And for your spirit’s still delight,Holy thoughts that star the night.

Spend all you have for loveliness,Buy it and never count the cost;

For one white singing hour of peacecount many a year of strife well lost,

And for a breath of ecstasyGive all you have been, or could be.

Although many later critics would not consider Teasdale a major poet, she was popular in her lifetime

with both the public and critics. She won the first Columbia Poetry Prize in 1918, a prize that would later

be renamed the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Critics found much of Teasdale's poetry to be unsophisticated but full of musical language and

evocative emotion. A New York Times Book Review contributor, writing about the 1917 edition of Love

Songs, asserted that "Miss Teasdale is first, last, and always a singer."

Saturday Review of Literature contributor Louis Untermeyer, insisted that Strange Victory "must

be ranked among her significant works," that its "beauty is in the restraint" of its "ever-present though never elaborated theme." J. Overmyer voiced similar

opinions of Teasdale's poetry, as its "simply stated thoughts are complex . . . and reverberate in the mind."

Teasdale's work in the 1926 book Dark of the Moon demonstrates her sensitivity to language. New York Times Book Review contributor Percy A. Hutchison

praised "the exquisite refinement of Sara Teasdale's lyric poetry," which "shows how near Sara Teasdale can

come to art's ultimate goals."http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/sara-teasdale

Sara Teasdale1884–1933

“Oh who can tell the range of joy or set the bounds of beauty?”