Sandburg, Carl - Louis Untermeyer (essay date 1919)

Louis Untermeyer (essay date 1919)

SOURCE: Untermeyer, Louis. “Carl Sandburg.” In The New Era in American Poetry, pp. 95-109. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1919.

[In the following essay, Untermeyer extols the combination of strength, delicacy, and passion in the verses of Chicago Poems and Cornhuskers.]

I can begin this chapter on Carl Sandburg in no better way than by admitting the worst thing that most of his adverse critics charge against him—his brutality. And, without hastening to soften this admission, I would like to quote a short passage from a volume to which I have already referred. In Synge's preface to his Poems and Translations (published in 1911) he wrote, “In these days poetry is usually a flower of evil or good; but it is the timber that wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms. … Even if we grant that exalted poetry can be kept successful by...

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