Carl Sandburg

Carl Sandburg was born in Galesburg, Illinois on January 6, 1878. [d. 1967] He lived to become a Pulitzer Prize winning poet and biographer of Abraham Lincoln, novelist, journalist, children's author, and troubadour of American folk songs. He grew up in the fields of Illinois, travelled the box cars of the midwest, campaigned for the Socialist party, was film critic and Chicago advocate. Carl Sandburg's poetry expresses the hearty, earthy nature of America, finding both soft and harsh beauty amongst her people.

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Carl Sandburg was born in Galesburg, Illinois, on January 6, 1878. [d. 1967] His parents, August and Clara Johnson, had emigrated to America from the north of Sweden. After encountering several August Johnsons in his job for the railroad, the Sandburg’s father renamed the family. The Sandburgs were very poor; Carl left school at the age of thirteen to work odd jobs, from laying bricks to dishwashing, to help support his family. At seventeen, he traveled west to Kansas as a hobo. He then served eight months in Puerto Rico during the Spanish-American war. While serving, Sandburg met a student at Lombard College, the small school located in Sandburg’s hometown. The young man convinced Sandburg to enroll in Lombard after his return from the war.

Sandburg worked his way through school, where he attracted the attention of Professor Philip Green Wright, who not only encouraged Sandburg’s writing, but paid for the publication of his first volume of poetry, a pamphlet called Reckless Ecstasy (1904). While Sandburg attended Lombard for four years, he never received a diploma (he would later receive honorary degrees from Lombard, Knox College, and Northwestern University). After college, Sandburg moved to Milwaukee, where he worked as an advertising writer and a newspaper reporter. While there, he met and married Lillian Steichen (whom he called Paula), sister of the photographer Edward Steichen. A Socialist sympathizer at that point in his life, Sandburg then worked for the Social-Democrat Party in Wisconsin and later acted as secretary to the first Socialist mayor of Milwaukee from 1910 to 1912.

The Sandburgs soon moved to Chicago, where Carl became an editorial writer for the Chicago Daily News. Harriet Monroe had just started Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, and began publishing Sandburg’s poems, encouraging him to continue writing in the free-verse, Whitman-like style he had cultivated in college. Monroe liked the poems’ homely speech, which distinguished Sandburg from his predecessors. It was during this period that Sandburg was recognized as a member of the Chicago literary renaissance, which included Ben Hecht, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, and Edgar Lee Masters. He established his reputation with Chicago Poems (1916), and then Cornhuskers (1918). Soon after the publication of these volumes Sandburg wrote Smoke and Steel (1920), his first prolonged attempt to find beauty in modern industrialism. With these three volumes, Sandburg became known for his free verse poems celebrating industrial and agricultural America, American geography and landscape, and the American common people.

In the twenties, he started some of his most ambitious projects, including his study of Abraham Lincoln. From childhood, Sandburg loved and admired the legacy of President Lincoln. For thirty years he sought out and collected material, and gradually began the writing of the six-volume definitive biography of the former president. The twenties also saw Sandburg’s collections of American folklore, the ballads in The American Songbag and The New American Songbag (1950), and books for children. These later volumes contained pieces collected from brief tours across America which Sandburg took each year, playing his banjo or guitar, singing folk-songs, and reciting poems.

In the 1930s, Sandburg continued his celebration of America with Mary Lincoln, Wife and Widow (1932), The People, Yes (1936), and the second part of his Lincoln biography, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (1939), for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. He received a second Pulitzer Prize for his Complete Poems in 1950. His final volumes of verse were Harvest Poems, 1910-1960 (1960) and Honey and Salt (1963). Carl Sandburg died in

1967.

A Selected Bibliography

Poetry

In Reckless Ecstasy, 1904

Chicago Poems, 1916

Cornhuskers, 1918

Smoke and Steel, 1920

Slabs of the Sunburnt West, 1922

Selected Poems, 1926

Good Morning, America, 1928

The People, Yes, 1936

Complete Poems, 1950

Harvest Poems, 1950

Honey and Salt, 1963

Prose

Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, 1926

The American Songbag, 1927

Steichen the Photographer, 1929

Mary Lincoln: Wife and Widow, 1932

Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, 1939

The New American Songbag, 1950

“Chicago”

Carl Sandburg

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:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your

pained women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.

And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: yes, it is true I have seen

the gunman kill and go free to kill again

And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women

and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.

And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my

city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:

Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be

alive and coarse and strong and cunning.

Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall

bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;

Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted

against the wilderness,

Bareheaded,

Shoveling,

Wrecking,

Planning,

Building, breaking, rebuilding,

Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,

Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,

laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,

Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs

the heart of the people,

Laughing!

Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laugher of Youth, half-naked,

sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,

Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.

“Fog”

Carl Sandburg

The fog comes

on little cat feet.

It sits looking

over harbor and city

on silent haunches

and then moves on.

“I Am the People, the Mob”

Carl Sandburg

I am the people--the mob--the crowd--the mass.

Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?

I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world's food and clothes.

I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons come from me

and the Lincolns. They die. And then I send forth more Napoleons and Lincolns.

I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand for much plowing.

Terrible storms pass over me. I forget. The best of me is sucked out

and wasted. I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and makes

me work and give up what I have. And I forget.

Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red drops for history

to remember. Then--I forget.

When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the People, use the

lessons of yesterday and no longer forget who robbed me last year,

who played me for a fool--then there will be no speaker in all the

world say the name: "The People," with any fleck of a sneer in his

voice or any far-off smile of derision.

The mob--the crowd--the mass--will arrive then.

“Honky Tonk in Cleveland, Ohio”

Carl Sandburg

It's a jazz affair, drum crashes and cornet razzes.

The trombone pony neighs and the tuba jackass snorts.

The banjo tickles and titters too awful.

The chippies talk about the funnies in the papers.

The cartoonists weep in their beer.

Ship riveters talk with their feet

To the feet of floozies under the tables.

A quartet of white hopes mourn with interspersed snickers:

“I got the blues.

I got the blues.

I got the blues.”

And . . . as we said earlier:

The cartoonists weep in their beer.

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