A prominent theme in Chicago Poems is the longing of ordinary people for the beauty and happiness they have never known. This clutching at dreams was not a creation of Sandburg's fantasy, but a social phenomenon which he accurately observed. (p. 18)

A more cheerful theme in Chicago Poems is the laughter and joy workmen manage to find in spite of their toil and poverty. (p. 19)

In the use of slang and undignified language Sandburg achieved in actuality the theory which Wordsworth set forth in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads: to "present incidents and situations from common life … in a selection of language really used by men …" Sandburg's poems are also more realistic than Wordsworth's, or even naturalistic (in the Zola sense), as in "The Walking Man of Rodin," with "The skull found always crumbling neighbor of the ankles." Yet Sandburg is also just as definitely romantic in his ability to see beauty in the commonplace. "The Shovel Man," for example, is

A dago working for a dollar six bits a day

And a dark-eyed woman in the old country dreams of him for one of the world's ready men with a pair of fresh lips and a kiss better than all the wild grapes that ever grew in Tuscany.

                                       (pp. 19-20)

In his second volume of poetry, Cornhuskers (1918), Sandburg played less the role of the urban poet and wrote more about rural sights and sounds and his wider experiences during World War I. (p. 20)

In these poems Sandburg shows his fondness for elemental things: sky, moon, stars, wind, birds, and animals. He celebrates nature in all seasons, but especially late summer and autumn: the ripening corn, the yellow cornflower in autumn wind, the blue of larkspur and Canadian thistle, and red-ripe tomatoes. (p. 21)

Sandburg has often been compared to Whitman, and he frequently wrote on the same themes, but always with his own handling of them. The long verses of "Prairie" look superficially like Whitman's form, but the music is different. A major distinction is in their treatment of the theme of death. To Whitman death was always beautiful, an old mother crooning a lullaby from the ocean of immortality, but to Sandburg death is the final irony of life—stillness, nothingness. In "Cool Tombs" Abraham Lincoln and his assassin, Ulysses Grant and the "con men" who brought shame to his administration, lovely Pocahontas and "a streetful of people" are all equalized "in the dust … in the cool tombs." This is one of Sandburg's most beautiful lyrics, and most devastatingly ironic. In "Grass" the scars of World War I will be covered by the perennial grass, not in a Pantheistic transmutation of men into vegetation, but as nature erases the scars of human violation of life. (pp. 22-3)

There are intimations, almost premonitions, of Eliot's Waste Land and "Hollow Men" in some passages in Smoke and Steel. In "Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind" the cedar doors are broken and the golden girls vanished from the city which thought itself "the greatest city,/the greatest nation:/nothing like us ever was." Now the black crows caw and the rats scribble their hieroglyphic footprints on dusty doorsills. (p. 25)

An important influence unconnected with the war which became obvious in Smoke and Steel was the Japanese haiku. Sandburg had already become more aware of images because of the Imagistic movement discussed and practiced by Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell in Harriet Monroe's Poetry [to which Sandburg himself had been a contributor as early as 1914]…. [The] haiku taught him to insinuate cryptic wisdom in an image. (p. 26)

Sandburg's third volume of poetry was followed not by another book of poems but by Rootabaga Stories (1922), stories he had made up to amuse his three little daughters. These stories have a fairy-tale sense of unreality, with transformations, actions that defy gravity, and the reduction of winds, moons, landscapes, and human actions to child-fantasy dimensions. But much of the fun is in the names and places, with their absurd sounds, outrageous puns, and comic imagery. (p. 27)

To reassert his faith in the common people and to help them regain confidence in themselves [after the Depression], he wrote and published The People, Yes (1936). An amalgam of folk wisdom and wit, verbal clichés, tall tales, preaching, slangy conversation, "cracker-barrel" philosophy, and Carl Sandburg cheerfulness, the book served its purpose, as Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath did in another manner. It was wildly praised by people who liked Sandburg, and mostly ignored by those who did not. Mark Van Doren in a lecture on Sandburg at the Library of Congress in 1969 said, "The People, Yes is talk, nothing but talk." Van Doren did not mean this in a derogatory sense, and he was right. In this long talky poem we hear the voices of hundreds of Americans, and by listening we learn what kind of people they are, their ambitions, prejudices, superstitions, sense of humor, optimism, generosity, and sense of identity. But The People, Yes now seems repetitious and tedious…. (p. 31)

The whole structure of [Sandburg's novel, Remembrance Rock (1948)], if it may be so classified, is … obviously symbolical (its chief fault)…. Some of the characters are historical and some are fictional, representing the earliest white settlers of America, the period of the American Revolution, the migrations into and across the Great Plains, the Civil War, and World War II.

As in all of his writings, Sandburg is facile with conversation in Remembrance Rock, but the reader is made too aware of what each speaker "stands for." The story has heroic people and epic action, yet the total effect is that of a patriotic pageant rather than a novel. (pp. 33-4)

[As] a reader and contributor to Poetry in its early years, [Sandburg] was aware of the arguments for and against "free verse," a form (or, as its opponents said, lack of form) in which the phrase is the prosodic unit and the words themselves create their own rhythms. More important than where Sandburg learned free-verse techniques is the fact that he had an excellent ear for the musical sequence of sounds, the balancing and counterpointing of phrase against phrase. Sandburg wrote for both the ear and the eye. His famous "Chicago" poem has an almost architectural structure, beginning with the short, pithy salutation epithets…. Both the line breaks and the accents in the phrases [of "Chicago"] play variations on the tempo, slowing or speeding up the sounds to add emphasis. The difference between these long lines and ordinary prose is in the skillful paralleling and accumulating of grammatical units (phrases and clauses). The resulting rhythm is grammatical, or rhetorical, rather than metrical. (pp. 36-7)

One of the many ways in which Sandburg's sense of rhythm became more subtle and sensitive was in his handling of syllabic weight, timbre, and vowel tone. This development culminated in the marvelous tone poem "When Death Came April Twelve 1945" [written upon the death of Franklin Roosevelt], which opens:

             Can a bell ring in the heart
             telling the time, telling a moment,
             telling off a stillness come,
             in the afternoon a stillness come
             and now never come morning?

The bell intones throughout the elegy, not mechanically as in Poe's "The Bells," but resonating the deep feelings of the nation grieving for its lost commander, and the sons lost in the South Pacific or on European soil, all now sleeping after toil and battle. The tones of the poem, reinforcing the images of stillness and silence, have the empathy of cleansing and calming the emotions of the readers (hearers). In every technical detail the elegy is almost perfectly ordered, timed, and developed…. (p. 38)

The longest and most ambitious poem in Honey and Salt is "Timesweep." The theme might be said to be the same as "Wilderness" (1918), in which the poet lyrically boasted of his kinship with foxes, wolves, and other wild animals. But "Timesweep" is both more genuinely lyrical and more philosophical, lyrical in the poet's empathy with the natural forces and creatures with which he feels a sympathetic kinship, and philosophical in his knowledge of his place in the cosmic scheme. (p. 42)

Sandburg's poem is more personal, less "prophetic" in tone [than Whitman's "Song of Myself," to which it has often been compared], more aware of human limitations, but the lyrical utterance of a sensitive man who enjoys the sights and sounds of his physical existence…. (p. 43)

Knowledge that some almost infinite (or perhaps infinite) chain of life begot him out of Nowhere to Somewhere gives Sandburg sufficient assurance of a purpose at work, however humanly unknowable. He will not worry about theology, or teleology. Yet "Timesweep" throws more light on Sandburg's philosophy than any other literary work of his. At the end of this last poem we find a summation of his humanism, rooted in his early socialism, and consolidated by a lifetime of effort to propagate the idea that the Family of Man is One Man:

There is only one man in the world and his name is All men.

                                     (pp. 44-5)

Gay Wilson Allen, in her Carl Sandburg (American Writers Pamphlet No. 101; © 1972, University of Minnesota), University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1972.