Teasdale's Suicide and "I Shall Not Care"
A common urban legend surrounds Teasdale's suicide. The legend claims that her poem "I Shall Not Care" (which features themes of abandonment, bitterness, and contemplation of death) was penned as a suicide note to a former lover. However, the poem was actually first published in her 1915 collection Rivers to the Sea, a full 18 years before her suicide:
Read more about this topic: Sara Teasdale
Famous quotes containing the words teasdale, suicide and/or care:
“The park is filled with night and fog,
The veils are drawn about the world,”
—Sara Teasdale (1884–1933)
“However great a man’s fear of life, suicide remains the courageous act, the clear-headed act of a mathematician. The suicide has judged by the laws of chance—so many odds against one that to live will be more miserable than to die. His sense of mathematics is greater than his sense of survival. But think how a sense of survival must clamour to be heard at the last moment, what excuses it must present of a totally unscientific nature.”
—Graham Greene (1904–1991)
“The return of my birthday, if I remember it, fills me with thoughts which it seems to be the general care of humanity to escape.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)