The Love Poet’s Secret Exit

A Poetry Tale about Sara Teasdale, told by Hello Doggo.

In the late spring of nineteen twenty-nine, Sara Teasdale, America’s great poet of longing, packed a bag and went to Reno, Nevada.

Reno meant one thing. Divorce. Stay in Nevada for three months, and the state would happily unmarry you.

Fifteen years earlier, she’d chosen a businessman, Ernst Filsinger, over the poet Vachel Lindsay, who adored her but doubted he could support her. Ernst was forever away on business. Now he’d sailed off to South Africa.

Sara, her biographers say, dreaded gossip. She told almost nobody. Two friends knew. Ernst did not.

So picture the summer. Ernst climbs into a tiny de Havilland Moth biplane in Johannesburg and is flown, stop by stop, all the way to Berlin. Weeks of it, hopping over Africa and Europe. And meanwhile his wife sits in Reno, quietly counting off the days.

Now, the story of how he found out comes from those biographers too, not from a court record. It goes like this: she only told him when her lawyers insisted. He was, apparently, astonished.

The divorce came through on the fifth of September.

Years before, she had published a poem that begins: “I am not yours, not lost in you.”

Back then, it was a lament. She longed to be lost.

In Reno, it was simply the paperwork.