Sandburg, Carl - Francis Hackett (review date 1916)

Francis Hackett (review date 1916)

SOURCE: Hackett, Francis. Review of Chicago Poems, by Carl Sandburg. New Republic 8, no. 104 (28 October 1916): 328-29.

[In the following review, Hackett admires the intensity and rhythm of Chicago Poems but disagrees with Sandburg's vision of Chicago.]

We seem to be getting new popular notions as to rhythm. It is not so very long since Ruskin raged about Wagner pretty much as he raged about Whistler. It was the correct philistine performance to resist the rhythm of Wagner and set him down as noise. People have already forgotten this senseless conservatism. The conceptions of dance rhythm and verse rhythm have similarly, recently, emancipated themselves. For ages the dancing “master” had complete charge of the thing called choreography, and he cared for nothing but the most regular rhythms. In poetry it was practically the same. “Hey diddle-diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the cow...

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