The Poetry of Carl Sandburg

I. Background

Carl Sandburg’s writing career was a remarkable success. During his lifetime,

both his poetry and his works of prose were enjoyed by a very large audience. Sandburg

was the only American poet ever asked to address Congress. He appeared on the Ed

Sullivan Show, on the Today Show with Dave Garroway, on See It Now with Edward R.

Murrow. Sandburg received large fees for poetry he wrote for popular publications such

as Woman’s Home Companion, Colliers, The Saturday Evening Post, and even Fortune

Magazine. He used his skills as a showman on the lecture circuit, where his readings of

his poetry were always received enthusiastically. For most of his career, Sandburg was

also a success in the eyes of his peers. During his lifetime he was awarded two Pulitzer

Prizes and more than a hundred honorary degrees. With the publication of his Chicago

Poems in 1916, Sandburg was hailed as a revolutionary who had, in the words of

Herbert Mitgang, “freed poetry from the old strictures at the same time artists and

sculptors were breaking their lines.” Eric Sevareid, the famous television commentator

of the fifties and sixties, called Sandburg “the strongest and most enduring force in

American letters.” But this judgment has turned out to be incorrect. When Sandburg

died in 1967, his popularity with the general public declined rapidly. His reputation

among his peers had started to fall even before his death. Today, his poetry is largely

ignored by the general public and it is viewed as “second-rate” by many poetry critics.

What caused this strange turn of events? Why was Sandburg’s poetry so widely
acclaimed when it first appeared, and why is it now so widely ignored? If we re-examine

Sandburg’s poetry, is there anything for us today in terms of its message or its style?

To understand Sandburg’s poetry, it is necessary to know something of his

personal background and upbringing. He was born in Galesberg, Illinois in 1878, the

second of seven children. His parents were first generation immigrants from Sweden.

Like most Europeans coming to the United States in the latter half of the nineteenth

century, the Sandburgs had a very difficult life. They, and others in the wave of

immigrants accompanying them, provided a much-needed source of cheap labor during a

time of rapid industrialization. Carl’s father worked as a blacksmith’s assistant for the

railroad - six days a week, ten hours a day, without sick leave or vacation time. He was

paid twelve cents an hour to shape the red-hot pieces of steel that were needed to repair

the locomotives and the freight cars that took loads of wheat and livestock to Chicago.

During his boyhood, in fact, until he was married and his wife persuaded him otherwise,

Carl was somewhat ashamed of his Swedish background – the speech patterns, the

clothes, the isolation, the grinding poverty. He wanted to be more “American.” When

he started school, he changed his name from Carl to Charlie and a few years later he

changed the spelling of his last name from “Sandberg” to the more American

“Sandburg.” Some critics would speculate that he never really lost his desire to be

“Americanized,” and that his poetry was only an extension of his need to be accepted by

others. One thing is certainly beyond speculation: Sandburg never lost the sympathy and

affection he felt for those he worked and suffered with in his younger years. These were

people trapped in a web of poverty and ignorance, living in a world of broken dreams,

but Sandburg saw them as a vital force. With their raw strength , perseverance, and hope
for the future, they were industrializing America, building the nation that emerged as a

world leader in the years after World War I.

Sandburg often looked back to his early roots in his poetry. As shown in the

following selection from Good Morning, America, besides looking back, sometimes he

also looked forward, and saw visions of T. S. Eliot’s Wasteland in the future:

First come the pioneers, lean, hungry, fierce, dirty.

They wrangle and battle with the elements.

They gamble on crops, chills, rheumatism.

They fight wars and put a nation on the map.

They battle with blizzards, lice, wolves.

They go on a fighting trail

To break sod for unnumbered millions to come.

Then the fat years arrive when the fat drips.

Then come the rich men baffled by their riches,

Bewildered by the silence of their tall possessions.

Then come the criers of the ancient desperate taunt:

Stuff your guts

and strut your stuff,

when you die your dead

and there’s no comeback

and not even the winds

will say your name-

 Sandburg draws heavily on the painful experiences of his younger life in

generating the images presented in his later work. His boyhood, his times of wandering

and working across the country as a hobo, his years as a struggling writer, all served as a

prelude to his works of poetry. The early part of his life was, as Willa Cather writes of

her own youth in the prologue of My Antonia, “a type of free masonry ... Unless you

grew up in one of these small towns…you could never know what it was like.”

Sandburg lived with the poverty and deprivation of the immigrants, he suffered and

struggled beside the outcasts of society, he saw first hand the cruelty of the businessmen

and politicians who used the people for their own purposes. He understood the plight of

society’s downtrodden. His poetry reflects a great respect for these people. A recurring

theme of Sandburg’s writing is the strength and resilience of common people.

Sandburg was what one might call an activist poet. He wrote about and for the

common people, trying to inform them of the evils of their society, trying to make them

aware of their strengths. He lived long enough to see the success of many of the causes

he fought for, causes including the elimination of child labor, and the improvement of

sanitary and safety conditions for factory workers.

Sandburg’s first efforts at poetry were made in the form of rhymed verse. Those

who later criticized his style of open-verse poetry, can be happy about one thing, namely,

that he did not continue to work with rhyme. Sandburg’s first published poem, Falling

Leaves, appeared in 1902 in a journal published by a friend. This effort was, as Penelope

Niven wrote in her biography of Sandburg, “undistinguished, with conventional rhyme,

bland, predictable imagery, and with trite choice of words.” The following verses from

the poem show a little of what she found so distasteful:

The trees now stand in stranger tints

Than all the summer knew,

Why took they on these golden glints

That autumn mists bedew?

The ground is strewn with russet leaves

Aweary seemed their fall;

Why fall these days the autumn leaves

Whence comes this yearly thrall?

Fortunately, even at this very early stage of his career, Sandburg was

experimenting with other styles of poetry, learning from other writers he admired, in

particular, Walt Whitman. His first published volume, Reckless Ecstasy, appeared in

1904. It contained some rhymed verse, some prose, and some blank verse, or, as

Sandburg himself referred to it, “blankety-blank verse.” Penelope Niven describes this

early work as “alternately brooding and euphoric, with little in the form to predict a

strong free verse style.” In this book, Sandburg did begin to touch on populist themes,

such as the oppression of working people and the importance of the power of the masses.
 After publication of Reckless Ecstasy, Sandburg continued to travel across the

country. He kept meticulous notes of his observations and impressions of people and

places. He worked a variety of temporary jobs and when funds were limited, he traveled

the rails as a hobo. During these years, he wrote essays, gave lectures, and made some

advances towards development of a style of open verse that was comfortable for him.

When he finally landed a job as an investigative reporter for the Chicago Sun Times, he

at last had the time – and he developed the discipline - to begin serious work as a writer.

He came to the fore in 1916 with the publication of Chicago Poems.

 II. Poetry

It is probably not too much of an exaggeration to say that the first lines of the first

poem in Chicago Poems have become immortal:

Hog Butcher for the World,

Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,

Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler

Stormy, husky, brawling,

City of the Big Shoulders…..

The harshness of the words and rhythms, the irregularity of the lines, the raw images,

were all well received by contemporary critics, who used words like “brash” and

“revolutionary” to describe the work. The personification of the city as energetic and

filled with life appealed to the “common people,” who purchased the book in record

numbers. But Chicago Poems is something more than a poetry style and popular

imagery. The poems are the beginning of Sandburg’s lifelong work of delivering a

message to the people, a message written in the people’s language, about the people’s

situation, about the people’s power to control their future. Ingegerd Friberg, in her

article The Clash of American Dreams in Carl Sandburg’s Poetry, sees Chicago Poems

as Sandburg’s first attempt to resolve - for himself and for the people he writes about -

the conflict between humanitarian concerns and the juggernaut of industrialization.

Friberg sees the city of Chicago as the symbol of industrialization, or as Leo Marx called
it, the “machine in the garden” where the “garden” is the natural, unspoiled wilderness

garden found in America by the first settlers. Sandburg sees Chicago as strong, vigorous,

productive, but it is also evil, crooked, deadly. Sandburg ends the first poem of the book

with admiration and pride for the city because it is an extension of the energies of the

people. But there is still the conflict of ideals. The city, with its industrial tentacles,

isolates people from the environment of nature and deprives them of the true joys of life.

In Mill Doors, a poem appearing later in the volume, Sandburg shows how the mill, an

extension of the city, sucks the life out of the workers:

You never come back.

I say good-by when I see you going in the doors,

The hopeless open doors that call and wait

And take you then for – how many cents a day?

How many cents for sleepy eyes and fingers?

I say good-by because I know they tap your wrists,

In the dark, in the silence, day by day,

And all the blood of you drop by drop,

And you are old before you are young.

You never come back.

 The idea of the city destroying those who do its work is further developed in the

poem They Will Say. Here the poet strikes out at one of his favorite targets, child labor:

Of my city the worst that men will ever say is this:

You took my little children away from the sun and the dew,

And the glimmers that played in the grass under the great sky,

And the reckless rain; you put them between walls

To work, broken and smothered, for bread and wages,

To eat dust in their throats and die empty-hearted

For a little handful of pay on a few Saturday nights.

Many of the poems in Chicago Poems play out the conflict between

industrialization and nature. The poor, the sick, the neglected of society, are shown in all

of their misery, laboring to raise the great city out of the prairie. Their reward for their

patient suffering is to live their lives shut from the light of day and to be “old before they

are young.” In this volume of his poems, Sandburg presents no clear resolution to the

conflict. In one of the poems, Muckers, there is some hint that the endurance of the

people, their ability to survive, may hold the key to a resolution of the conflict:

Twenty men stand watching the muckers.

Stabbing the sides of the ditch

Where clay gleams yellow,

 Driving the blades of their shovels

Deeper and deeper for the new gas mains,

Wiping sweat off their faces

With red bandannas

The muckers work on , pausing to pull

Their boots from the suckholes where they slosh.

Of the twenty men looking on

Ten murmur, “O, it’s a hell of a job,”

Ten others, “Jesus, I wish I had the job.”

The images presented in this poem - the stabbing shovels, the sweating, struggling men,

the yellow mud sucking them down in the ditches where they work – help us to see a

group of men working together, oblivious to their pain, battling for the common good.

And if they fail, we see that there are other men ready to take up their struggle, in spite

of the fact that “it’s a hell of a job.” The themes presented here are common in

Sandburg’s poetry. The men, or the people, are strong, patient, laboring, enduring, and

because of the continuity of the human race, they are not to be denied. They will

conquer all. The other theme presented here is the way the muckers are used (or abused)

by those they work for. When one looks at the man in the ditch as an individual, rather

than as a member of a group, his lot seems hopeless. He will never reap the fruits of his

labor. Like the children in They Will Say, he will die empty-hearted.
 It seems that the form of Sandburg’s poetry, his stark images, his irregular or

non-existent rhythms, his use of slang, all help to pass his message. He is speaking to the

common people, about their hopes and dreams, about their problems and

disappointments, about their power and possibilities. He uses the language of the people

to convey his message.

One criticism of Sandburg’s poetry, even at this early stage of his career, was that

he focused too narrowly on specific issues. Take for example, the case of Anna Imroth,

a young girl who died in a factory fire. A jury of “peers” found the factory owner

innocent of the charge of negligence in the death, even though the factory had no fire

escapes. The death was determined to be an act of God. Sandburg addresses the issue in

his poem, Anna Imroth:

Cross her hands over her breasts, here – so.

Straighten her legs a little more – so.

And call for the wagon to come and take her home.

Her mother will cry some and so will her sisters and brothers

But all the others got down and they are safe and this is the only

one of the factory girls who wasn’t lucky in making

the jump when the fire broke.

It is the hand of God - and the lack of fire escapes.

 One could ask whether this was really poetry or editorializing. Sandburg was

criticized for trivializing his poetry. The bottom line is that hundreds of thousands of

people read Sandburg’s words. They were moved by the bitter irony and eventually laws

were changed.

After the immense success of Chicago Poems, Sandburg turned out succeeding

volumes with clock-like regularity. These later volumes were similar in style and

explored many of the themes already presented in Chicago Poems. The very popular

volume Corn Huskers was published in 1918, followed by Smoke and Steel in 1920,

Slabs of the Sunburnt West in1922, Selected Poems in 1926, Good Morning, America in

1928. In 1936, Sandburg published what many consider to be his finest work, The

People, Yes.

As Ingegerd Friberg points out, the theme of “the machine in the garden,” or the

conflict between the people and the their institutions, runs through all of these later

volumes. In Corn Huskers, the prairie is used as the embodiment of the natural garden.

Conflicts between the machine and the garden, the city and the prairie, the people and

their institutions, are explored more fully, or as some would say, they were explored

again. In this book, the prairie emerges as Sandburg’s symbol for the people and their

great strengths. The prairie was here before the cities, the men are a part of the prairie,

and the prairie will be here when the cities are gone. The opening lines of the Corn

Huskers define the relationship between man and the prairie:

I was born on the prairie and the milk of its wheat,

the red of its clover, the eyes of its women,

 gave me a song and a slogan.

The prairie sings to me in the forenoon

and I know in the night, I rest easy

in the prairie arms, on the prairie heart.

O prairie mother, I am one of your boys.

The people are children of the prairie, and the prairie is eternal:

I am here when the cities are gone

I am here before the cities come.

I nourished the lonely men on horses.

I will keep the laughing men who ride iron.

I am dust of men.

The union of the eternal prairie with men is something of a resolution of the

conflict between the machine and the garden. Like the prairie, the men are eternal and

mankind will endure after the cities are gone. The cities are only temporary prisons

shutting the people away from nature.

In Smoke and Steel Sandburg offers another resolution of the conflict. In this

book, he seems to see men as a part of the work they do, a part of their institutions. In

the first poem of this volume, a bar of steel becomes the symbol of the “machine.”
 A bar of steel – it is only

Smoke at the heart of it, smoke and the blood of a man.

A runner of fire ran in it, ran out

And left – smoke and the blood of a man

And the finished steel, chilled and blue.

So fire runs in, runs out, runs somewhere else again,

And the bar of steel is a gun, a wheel, a nail, a shovel,

A rudder under the sea, a steering gear in the sky;

And always dark in the heart and through it,

Smoke and the blood of a man.

Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Gary, they make their steel with men.

The smoke nights write their oaths:

Smoke into steel and blood into steel;

Homestead, Braddock, Birmingham,

They make their steel with men.

Smoke and blood is the mix of steel.

In this poem, man is seen to give a soul to the work of his hands. This is a sort of

immortality. But man also has the capacity for evil, as is shown in Man, the Man-

Hunter. Here Sandburg gives us images of the horrors he witnessed during the Chicago

race riots:
 I saw Man, the man-hunter,

Hunting with a torch in one hand

And kerosene can in the other,

Hunting with guns, ropes, shackles.

I listened

And the high cry rang,

The cry of Man, the man-hunter:

We’ll get you yet, you son-of-a bitch.

I listened later,

The high cry rang

Kill him! Kill him! Kill the son-of-a-bitch

In Smoke and Steel, Sandburg seems to reduce the conflict between the machine

and the garden to a conflict within each human being. Man has the capacity for good or

for evil, and since he can not be separated from his actions, man must decide how the

conflict will be resolved.

Sandburg’s clearest resolution of the conflict is given in The People, Yes. In this

volume, written at the peak of the Great Depression, Sandburg makes a resounding

statement of confidence in the people. The People, Yes is a collection of 107 numbered

short poems. It is really one long poem celebrating the endurance, the tenacity, the
ultimate wisdom of the people. In an essay entitled Carl Sandburg: Fire and Smoke,

Gary Wilson writes of The People, Yes: “It was written during the great economic

depression and when it appeared, many critics hailed it as a sociological document and a

political philosophy. Reading it today, we can see that it was neither. It is rather a psalm

– written out of Sandburg’s religion of humanity.”

In The People, Yes Sandburg sees the people as the source of everything that

comes from society:

From the people the countries get their armies.

By the people are the armies fed, clothed, armed.

Out of the smoke and ashes of war

The people build again their two countries with two flags

Even though it is one land, one blood, one people.

And after the strife of war

Begins the strife of peace.

In one of the poems, Sandburg asks:

Who shall speak for the people?

Who knows the people, the migratory harvest hands,

Who knows this from pit to peak?

 His answer is the metaphor of the sea and the wind:

The sea moves always, the wind moves always.

They want and want and there is no end to their wanting.

What they sing is the song of the people.

Man will never arrive, man will always be on the way.

The force that keeps men going in their struggles is hope. Hope lifts men above

their dark surroundings:

Hope is a tattered flag and a dream out of time,

The evening star inviolable over the coal mines,

The shimmer of northern lights across a bitter winter night,

The blue hills beyond the smoke of the steel works,

The kiss and the comforting laugh and resolve –

Hope is an echo, hope ties itself yonder, yonder.

At present, the people sleep, but they will awaken.

The people sleep.

Ai! ai! the people sleep

Yet the sleepers toss in their sleep

And an end comes of sleep

And the sleepers wake.

 Ai, ai, the sleepers wake.

When the people awaken, when they no longer listen to the “lying politicians, the

lying labor skates, the lying racketeers of business,” then the true power of the people

will be felt.

Who can fight against the future?

You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.

Time is the great teacher.

In the darkness with a great bundle of grief

The people march.

In the night, the people march.

Where to? What next?

Sandburg is convinced that man, driven by an unquenchable hope, will be

victorious in his struggles. Man, the dreamer, the seeker, can not be denied.
 III. Legacy

The decline in popularity of Sandburg’s poetry began first among his own peers –

other poets and critical reviewers. Some had never liked Sandburg’s work, even from his

earliest days. Robert Frost, for instance, compared Sandburg’s free verse poetry to a

game of tennis played without a net. When Sandburg’s poetry became popular in other

countries, Frost remarked that Sandburg was one of the few poets whose work was

improved by translation into another language. Most of the negative criticism of

Sandburg’s poetry, however, seems to have started after World War II, when the “New

Poetry,” with its abstract symbolism and reference to obscure events was becoming more

popular in literary circles. In a review of Sandburg’s poetry written for the September,

1951 issue of Poetry Magazine William Carlos Williams wrote “Sandburg’s poetry

makes a dune-like mass; no matter where you dig into it, it is still sand.” Joseph Epstein,

writing for Commentary in 1992 stated “Sandburg’s poetry reveals a dismal sameness, a

mastery over faded slang, revealing a uniform thinness… his poetry can not stand up to

the intense scrutiny practiced by the New Critics.” Sandburg’s response to this wave of

technical rejection was “I say to hell with the New Poetry. Poets today don’t want a

poem to say what it means. They have symbols and abstractions and a code among

themselves. Sometimes I think it is just a series of ear wigglings.” There is certainly

some justification for this response. In the latter part of the twentieth century, there were

critics and writers, John Rubin, for example, who believed that poetry was not for
masses. It was something reserved for a select elite. This was a view that Sandburg

could not accept.

Sandburg never really had to face the loss of favor of his poetry with the general

public. That came after his death in 1967. There are several possible explanations for

this turn of events. One is that the great images appearing in Sandburg’s poetry

disappeared from the landscape. The rolling prairies vanished as completely as Willa

Cather’s Nebraska frontier. The narrow, muddy streets of the cities, the sky-darkening

smokestacks, the windowless factories were, for the most part, a thing of the past. As the

downtrodden workers of Sandburg’s youth became more affluent, they left the darkness

of the cities for bright new suburbs. The human misery of society was contained in

ghettoes where it could be easily ignored. Another reason for Sandburg’s decline in

popularity is that the “people” he wrote about have changed. They are no longer –

perhaps they never were – the patient, struggling, dreaming seekers that Sandburg saw.

The medium for communicating ideas today is not writing, either in prose or poetry. It is

television, and the “people” are consumers, customers, not dreamers and seekers.

Sandburg’s message seems overly sentimental in today’s world of impersonal deadlines

and bottom lines.

Ingegerd Friberg discusses one other possible reason for Sandburg’s fall from

favor in the eyes of the general public - one that I believe is more important than those

just discussed. As Friberg points out, “Sandburg’s optimistic belief in a free society

created through man’s capacity for longing and dreaming, seems to have been replaced

by utter pessimism, reflected both in movements in contemporary society and in works

of literature.” It will be interesting to see if the pessimism referred to by Friberg

continues into the future. It appears to me that this pessimism arose in the years after
World War II because mankind was faced with the constant threat of total nuclear

destruction. But during the past few years, as Sandburg might have guessed, man, “the

little two legged joker” has begun to find a path around even that great abyss.

The free man willing to pay and struggle and die

for the freedom for himself and others….

Some day when the United States of the Earth

gets going and runs smooth and pretty

there will be more of him than we have now.

Does Sandburg have anything to offer us today? I have a volume of Sandburg’s

Complete Poems. I have had it for several years but have never read it all. I find myself

thumbing through it from back to front, reading here and there. It is images and ideas,

and the images and the ideas seem to change as you look at them at different times. The

spirit of optimism is the thing we need most today. That spirit would, as Sandburg wrote

in The People, Yes, “see us through the dark times and sudden betrayals.” A few weeks

before his assassination, Martin Luther King was asked about the failures of his civil

rights movement, about the rising popularity of those who sought violent solutions to

their situation. In his response, King paraphrased the following lines from The People,

Yes:

Man is a long time coming.

Man will yet win.

 Brother may yet line up with brother.

This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.

What is difficult to stand up against today

Will be sweet to remember tomorrow.

Sandburg does have something to say to us today.

 IV. Sources

I have used several sources in gathering information for this presentation. Carl

Sandburg’s Complete Poems, published in 1969, two years after his death, contains all

but a few of his poems. Almost any encyclopedia contains articles on poetry. The

sections on American poetry give discussions of how Sandburg’s poetry fits in with the

broad changes occurring during the twentieth century. The key point here is that

Sandburg was not a part of or even associated with the “New Poetry” that developed

during the latter part of his life. Penelope Niven’s Carl Sandburg, a Biography,

published in 1991, provided material on Sandburg’s life and also gave some interesting

discussions of his poetic style at various times during his life. Ingegerd Friberg’s article

The Clash of American Dreams in Carl Sandburg’s Poetry discusses the themes of

Sandburg’s poetry in terms of conflicts between pastoral and urban ways of life, between

romanticism and realism, between man and his institutions. Joseph Epstein’s article The

People’s Poet, in the May, 1992 issue of Commentary, discusses Sandburg’s poetry from

the viewpoint of a “New Critic.” Herbert Mitgang’s article Carl Sandburg, appearing in

the January, 1978 issue of The New Republic discusses Sandburg’s work from what

might be called a “populist” point of view.