Sandburg, Carl (Vol. 1) | Sandburg, Carl 1878–1967
Sandburg, Carl 1878–1967
Sandburg was a Whitmanesque poet, a short story writer, a singer, and a biographer of Abraham Lincoln. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 5-8, rev. ed.; obituary, Vols. 25-28.)
I can't make a hero of Sandburg. Programmatically, he is absolutely sound. His poetry was rooted in real speech, in folksongs and lore, in real people, with never the slip of literature showing, always tied to a concrete situation and event, distinguishing itself fundamentally and all along the line from the English tradition and diction, so foreign to the Middle West of Swedish harvest hands and French voyageurs. No one, not even Whitman, has ever embarked on an American literary career with sounder ideas and better intentions. What happened? The war; the Red Raids; Normalcy. The perfection of that monstrous hallucination piped into every head from Madison Avenue—the American Way of Life. Sandburg fell for it…. At that point...
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