Carl Sandburg

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David Perkins

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In the following essay, David Perkins examines Carl Sandburg's poetic style, highlighting his ability to depict the American people and landscape with a flexible and inventive approach, though critiquing his tendency towards a minimalistic demand on his poetry, which often results in works lacking depth and synthesis.

[Vachel] Lindsay once said that "the people of America walk through me, all the people walk through my veins, as though they were in the streets of a city, and clamor for voice." But it was Carl Sandburg …, even more than Lindsay, who wrote the poetry whose underlying intention is suggested by these words. His legacies to later poets were his "report of the people," as William Carlos Williams called it, and his flexible, inventive, and scrapbook methods of presentation. His work provoked bitter controversy. To admirers he seemed to give poetry purpose and relevance and to liberate its technique. (p. 356)

The Chicago Poems were a shock to most readers. The title poem created a myth of the city as a strong man, a sweating worker, and rejoiced in his brutal strength. Other poems pictured the urban and industrial milieu. Sandburg underscored the contrast of the slums with the wealthy homes along the lakeshore; he pictured such sights as the skyscrapers looming in the smoke…. He tended especially to give portraits or brief accounts of typical characters….

Here was a directly phrased poetry of the contemporary world. It gave sights and sounds. It showed people at work. It had something to say about the character and quality of their lives. It dwelt on the romance in the familiar and it enforced a political and social message by concrete contrasts. (p. 357)

Sandburg did not merely describe the people; he glorified them. He was the opposite of Eliot, who was repelled by "Apeneck Sweeney" and the "damp souls of housemaids." To Sandburg the picnicking Hungarians, the prostitutes, the shovel man, and the working girls were so many jewels, which his poetry exhibited. (p. 358)

The theme of his next volume, Cornhuskers (1918), was the prairie. Here he pictured farm people and their work. He also dwelled on the beauty and fatness, the mellow scents and sounds of the land. Social protest was not present in all his Chicago Poems nor was it absent from Cornhuskers, but most of the pieces in the latter, such as "Grass" and "Cool Tombs," were lyrics of a more traditional type, contemplating time, vastness, change, perenniality, and death. Sandburg did not wrestle very strenuously with these mysteries; neither did he find them very chilling. It is poetry of the agreeable kind, bland, relaxed, simply direct, and very fond of its subject.

Henceforth Sandburg's poetry tended to fall into one or the other of these loosely separate kinds: he either dwelled on the lives and qualities of the people or felt a "philosophic" pathos—he often did both in the same poem. There are also pleasant poetic impressions, such as "Fog." The effect of the 771 pages of his poetry is no test of his worth, but is may be remarked that his "philosophic" pathos becomes wearisome because it lacks energy. He recites fact with an absence or inarticulateness of feeling and with comparatively few thoughts in his head. The effect is of a quizzicalness or a slight wonder or a vague, momentary disturbance of mind, soon settling into calm…. Similarly, his poems of social protest are often no more than sketchy outlines in black and white. (pp. 358-59)

Better than any other poet, Sandburg represents the new style of the 1910s—the "modern" style before Eliot…. In Sandburg one sees what the age had to teach about writing. "Chicago" is an imitation of Whitman; some of the Chicago Poems might be one-deimensional versions of the Robinsonian portrait; some are Impressionist; some combine Impressionism with the sparer imagery of Japanese verse. As for Imagism, Sandburg said he had no connection with it. But his poems seek the concreteness and objectivity which the Imagists communicated to American poetry in general. He is not always simple or easy to understand, but the materials of his poetry—the facts, images, allusions—are never recondite.

The most striking thing about Sandburg's style is its flexibility and inventiveness, its freedom to use whatever means or methods seem appropriate…. His vocabulary is simple and seldom "poetic" or abstract but, with these limitations, it is flexibly ready to adapt to the subject. He exploits the diction of common speech when it suits him, and one finds slang and vigorous folk metaphors…. Usually, however, his diction has a precision that mitigates the impression of vernacular speech. His syntax can have the shapelessness of talk:

         And I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the
               trees with their women and children
               and a keg of beer and an accordion.

But he also makes much use of parallel syntax and repetition, and his effects can be decidedly rhetorical. He never uses meters. That is the only general remark that can be made about his versification, for everything depends on the effect he seeks, which may require a drumming, recurrent rhythm or a rhythmless sprawl. The principles of form that govern his poetry are simply the principles of effective thinking and presentation in general—revelance, economy, contrast, conclusion, and the like.

He was more gifted in sympathy than in synthesis. He enters, though not deeply, into characters, feelings, and objects over a broad range but takes them one at a time…. The objects accumulated or contrasted make a meaningful pattern, but they do not interpenetrate…. The list of associations is one of his main poetic forms. He picks a large, vague subject—"Prairie," "River Roads," "Band Concert," "Smoke and Steel," "Pennsylvania," "Hazardous Occupations"—and accumulates facts, thoughts, images, and poetic feelings about it. The effect is of a scrapbook. Its items convey the same general attitude of appreciation, social protest, or whatever. The People, Yes (1936), a heap of sayings, anecdotes, character sketches, dialogues, and the like, shows the method at book length; the subject is "the people" and the attitude is "yes." Sandburg's greatest weakness as a poet was the minimal demand he made of a poem. It was enough to render the sound of the wind ("Wind Song") or contrast the bustle of a street by day with its stillness by night ("Blue Island Intersection"). Or it was enough merely to make some bland observation, or evoke some pleasant object or feeling, or accumulate images without tension or wit. His example helped poets surrender to what Yeats called the greatest temptation of the artist, creation without toil. (pp. 359-61)

David Perkins, in his A History of Modern Poetry: From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode (copyright © 1976 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College; excerpted by permission of the author and publishers), Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1976.

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