19 pages • 38 minutes read
Sara TeasdaleThere Will Come Soft Rains
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1918A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context
Despite her celebrity as one of her generation’s foremost poets and despite the renaissance in American women poets that defined the early decades of the 20th century, contemporary audiences have largely forgotten Sara Teasdale. To discover Teasdale’s poetry now is to explore a generation of American women poets summarily marginalized—most notably Edna St. Vincent Millay, Margaret Widdemer, Leonora Speyer, and Amy Lowell—who despite selling widely in their time, have become something of their own Lost Generation.
Influenced by the disciplined poetics and emotional themes of British poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti, and influenced by Emily Dickinson, Teasdale reflected the dominant characteristics of this generation of American women poets: conversational diction, a proclivity for the lyrical subtleties of rhyme and rhythm, and the confessional feeling of shared intimacy. At the turn of the century, Teasdale’s poems looked, sounded, and scanned like poems. However, against the emerging influence of the expatriate American Modernists—dominated by men poets like Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens—with their commitment to intellectualizing poetry and revolutionizing poetic forms by avant-garde experimentation in structure that alienated most lay readers but engaged the critical establishment, Teasdale and her generation of American women poets were ushered to the margins—their poetry dismissed as sentimental and derivative.
Historic Context
“There Will Come Soft Rains” reflects Teasdale’s reaction to three historic events: Congressional passage of the Sedition Act in 1918, the insidious spread of influenza that by 1918 was a pandemic killing more than 50 million people, and the controversial evolution theories of Charles Darwin.
Responding to growing cries against American involvement in what was seen as Europe’s war, with the full cooperation of President Woodrow Wilson, Congress crafted the 1918 Sedition Act. The Act was in apparent violation of the First Amendment rights and a blatant assertion of state-sponsored censorship; it made any written or spoken criticism against the federal government a crime punishable by up to 20 years imprisonment. Citing the exigent circumstances of a country now at war, the act held those who criticized the government—political reformers, anti-capitalist activists, labor reformers, suffragettes, and pacifists—as traitors fomenting resistance and destroying national morale. Within that toxic environment, Teasdale—who deeply objected not just to American involvement in a war in which they had nothing to gain but to war itself as a moral violation—expressed her convictions in a poem that appeared to have little to do with government policies or military strategies. Only after the war when the poem appeared in Teasdale’s collection in 1922 did she add the subtitle: War Time.
As the war dragged on and casualties mounted, Teasdale’s New York City was ravaged by an influenza pandemic that—until the onset of Covid-19 more than a century later—was the deadliest medical crisis in American history. Without a vaccine or coordinated government action to contain the virus’s spread, the city’s teeming populations living in close quarters (often with minimum sanitary conditions) fell victim in wave after wave of deaths. For Teasdale, the helplessness of people against the savagery of the virus argued a forbidding, apocalyptic future for humanity. There, Teasdale found some direction in Darwin’s grand-scale evolutionary perceptions of humanity’s development. Darwin argued that the Earth and its teeming species were constantly changing in efforts to preserve the sheer kinetic energy of living matter. If WWI promised endless and pointless carnage and if nature could cook up a virus capable of wiping out millions, Darwin’s theory suggested that a planet in constant flux inevitably moved toward survival, if not of any one species than of life itself—hence the pastoral tableau of “There Will Come Soft Rains.”
