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Authors
Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)
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The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg (1950) was revised and expanded in 1970. Breathing Tokens (1978), edited by Margaret Sandburg, prints unpublished poems. Billy Sunday and Other Poems (1993), edited by George and Willene Hendrick, contains some of his unpublished, uncollected, and unexpurgated poems. In addition to eight full-length volumes of poetry, Sandburg wrote a Pulitzer Prize–winning study of Abraham Lincoln: Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, 2 vols. (1926), and Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, 4 vols. (1939), two collections of journalism and social commentary, Rootabaga Stories for children, a novel, and a book of American folk songs. Fables, Foibles and Foobles (1988), edited by George Hendrick, is a selection of unpublished humorous pieces. More Rootabagas (1993), edited by Hendrick, contains stories for children. Selected Poems (1996) was edited by George and Willene Hendrick. The Letters of Carl Sandburg (1968, 1988) was edited by Herbert Mitgang. The Poet and the Dream Girl: The Love Letters of Lilian Steichen and Carl Sandburg (1987, 1999) was edited by Margaret Sandburg. Always the Young Strangers (1953) and Ever the Winds of Chance (1983), edited by Margaret Sandburg and George Hendrick, are segments of Sandburg’s autobiography. A full-scale biography is Penelope Niven’s Carl Sandburg: A Biography (1991). Critical studies include Richard Crowder’s Carl Sandburg (1964) and Philip R. Yannella’s The Other Carl Sandburg (1996).
Carl Sandburg was one of the most recognized members of the Chicago Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. When Poetry, an important magazine founded during the Renaissance, published Sandburg's poem Chicago in 1914, he rose to celebrity status. The poems he went on to write celebrated the working classes of America and used simple vocabulary and everyday speech to appeal to everyday readers. Besides being a poet and a journalist, Sandburg was an active populist and socialist who often expressed his political views in his verse. His poetry collections include Chicago Poems (1914), Cornhuskers (1918), Smoke and Steel (1920), and Slabs of the Sunburnt West (1922). In addition, Sandburg was an important collector of American folklore and folk songs, which he printed in such collections as The American Songbag (1927) and The People, Yes (1936).
Questions for Discussion and Writing
The NAAL Sandburg selections offer a fine sampling of his range. There are Imagist or Vorticist lines here which suggest Pound; other lines recall William Carlos Williams; some stanzas seem strongly Whitmanesque; and some themes suggest the darkness of Robinson. A very popular and valued American poet for several decades of the twentieth century, Sandburg tried many voices and modes in celebrating modern American experience and working people. Was he a unique voice in his own right or a popularizer of voices and forms which really belonged to other artists?
1. Read over the NAAL selections and comment on Sandburg as a nature poet. Does he address nature as Whitman does, with Whitman's Transcendentalist faith in the inherent divinity of the natural world? Do Sandburg's city scenes and city poems suggest that the urban landscape exists within a larger, redemptive natural context? Or apart from and alien to that context?
2. In these poems, Sandburg appears to favor stark contrasts -- between the poor and the rich, the living and the dead, the work of human beings and the work of natural or cosmic forces. Does that delight in contrasts enrich these poems? Does it make them predictable or schematic? Cite specific lines and moments from these poems in framing your answer.
