Sandburg, Carl 1878–1967

Sandburg, an American, was a poet of real people, of folksongs and ordinary speech. His work is characterized by his sincere and abiding love for America's beauty and brawn and he was, as a result, one of this country's most revered literary men. In addition to his poems, he wrote short stories and a well-known biography of Abraham Lincoln. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 5-8, rev. ed.; obituary, Vols. 25-28.)

Carl Sandburg's poems, generally, are improvisations whose wording is approximate; they do not have the exactness, the guaranteeing sharpness and strangeness of a real style. Sandburg is a colorful, appealing, and very American writer, so that you long for his little vignettes or big folk editorials, with their easy sentimentality and easy idealism, to be made into finished works of art; but he sings songs more stylishly than he writes them, says his poems better than they are written—it is marvelous to...

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