Sandburg, Carl - Alfred Kreymborg (essay date 1934)

Alfred Kreymborg (essay date 1934)

SOURCE: Kreymborg, Alfred. “Springfield, Spoon River and the Prairies.” In Our Singing Strength: A History of American Poetry, pp. 368-94. New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1934.

[In the following essay, Kreymborg traces Sandburg's poetic development from Chicago Poems to Good Morning, America.]

… In 1914, Harriet Monroe's Poetry issued a group of poems by a stranger named Carl Sandburg. It included the ode to the “Hog Butcher for the World,” Chicago. A lanky galoot, with a bang over one eye, had finally arrived: he was thirty-six at the time. One recalls the violent sensation the group aroused. What right had any man to be so brutal in print, and what right had our most brutal city to such eulogies? How in the name of America could culture continue if it fell into the hands of Swedes and stevedores and picked up the slang of filthy Mid-Western pavements? And what was a poetry...

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