[Sandburg's] way of using language can be deceptive. It is much like prose in its syntax, and the colloquial vocabulary adds to an apparent casualness. In his best poetry Sandburg uses vernacular language, slang even; by this I mean that in Sandburg's instance it isn't the self-conscious employment of a "low" vocabulary to call attention to commonness, a vaunting of plebeian virtue (though later in his career Sandburg was prone to do just this, ad nauseam). An expression such as "the crack trains of the nation" is an organic part of his vocabulary, not an affectation, and he employs the adjective because it is simply the appropriate word to image what he wishes to convey about the train. As such it provides precisely the intensification of language, the heightened awareness of the texture of experience, that the best poetry affords.

I stress this because unless the way in which Sandburg employs vernacular imagery is properly recognized, his way of poetry will be misunderstood. If we compare, for example, "Limited" [in Chicago Poems (1916)] with another fine poem about a train, Stephen Spender's "Express," we can see the difference. Spender writes of "the black statement of pistons," portrays the train as "gliding like a queen," as "gathering speed" so that "she acquires mystery," and so on, until "like a comet through flames she moves entranced," and as conclusion: "Wrapt in her music, no bird song, no, nor bough/Breaking with honey buds, shall ever equal." Spender thus asserts in his poem that the train, an artifact of industrialism, is eminently worthy of the kind of aesthetic contemplation accorded to other objects that have traditionally been the subject of poems. He does it by applying to the train certain imagery and reference customarily ascribed to more familiarly poetic matter, and he ends his poem with the assertion that the beauty of the train is superior to that of most conventionally beautiful objects.

Sandburg might well have agreed, but in "Limited" he felt no occasion to assert the right of the train to such treatment. On the contrary he assumes it, as a matter of language. To refer to a "crack" train, to "fifteen all-steel coaches," to "diners" and "sleepers," to a man as being "in the smoker" is in his poetics all that the railroad imagery needed to make his point; and he will conduct his poem in such terms, without any feeling of self-consciousness in doing so, and without having to introduce traditional poetic imagery to justify the depiction of a train in a poem. This is what I mean about the language as being vernacular in an organic way, not as tour de force or demonstration. (pp. 182-83)

Of course there is no inherent literary virtue to using vernacular discourse in a poem, or for that matter any other kind of discourse. But given Sandburg's mastery of the vernacular, his ability as a poet to think in it without self-consciousness, it should be obvious that he enjoys certain advantages in dealing as poet with the kind of experience that he writes about. If you wish to write a poem about a railroad train, then if you can do so in the kind of documentary denotation that you and others customarily use to think about a train, without having to introduce for your purposes a different convention of language not customarily applied to it, you will be able to come closer to being able to reproduce your personal experience of the train. The same goes for other objects of Sandburg's experience…. And in the poems of Sandburg's best years he is able not only to invest that kind of experience with language that can give it the intensity of poetry but also to achieve the intensification within and through the rhythms, syntax, parallelisms, and imagery of the vernacular reference customarily employed to denote that experience. He is able, in short, to make the ordinary into the extraordinary on its own terms, without violating the everyday authenticity of the documentation.

The result is an enlargement of the range and nature of our poetic experience through his poems. Any good poet provides that; Sandburg's particular talent is that he opens up areas of our experience which are not ordinarily considered objects of aesthetic contemplation, through language that enables him, and us, to recognize such experience in new ways.

A great deal has been made of his work as being, in its subject and its language, essentially midwestern American, and this is quite true. It is not thereby the less general or sophisticated in its relevance, however; and the view of Sandburg as a kind of rude, untutored regional bard whose poetry achieves its effects through its presentation of novel subjects attendant upon the industrialization of the cities and towns of the Corn Belt hardly bears serious scrutiny. He is, at his best, a poet of much subtlety and sophistication; and it is through the skillful intensification of language, not fresh subjects alone, that he works his art. It is true that his language is much closer to the rhythms and word choices of vernacular discourse than what one normally encounters in verse, but it is precisely through that discourse that he works his poetry…. [It] is not the subject as such, so much as what Sandburg does with the language, that makes the poem. Sandburg's best poetry will survive, where the once popular Spoon River Anthology of Edgar Lee Masters has faded, because Masters placed his emphasis on subject, the "thought," while Sandburg at his best achieves it with language.

There is, of course, a built-in psychological hazard in such poetics, and by the early 1920s Sandburg succumbed to it. The best poems in Chicago Poems (1916), Cornhuskers (1918), and Smoke and Steel (1920) succeed because of the tension between the idiom and the subject; their impact lies in the resolution, through language, of that tension. But from using vernacular language to intensify everyday experience into poetry it is an easy, and a fatal, step for one to begin assuming that because the experience is ordinary and the language is of the earth earthy, they are therefore inherently Poetic. To depict in compelling and appropriate language a train moving across the prairie is one thing; it is another and a considerably less interesting matter to assert that because it is a train on the midwestern American prairie, and because the language is avowedly vernacular, the joint appearance within a poem constitutes the poetry. On the contrary the instant that the tension between language and object is slackened, what is produced is not poetry but rhetoric.

This is what begins happening to Sandburg as poet very early in his career; following the Chicago Poems his poetry shows an increasing tendency thereafter, in almost a kind of geometric progression, to substitute rhetoric about experience for evocation of his experience. Sandburg began to believe his press notices. He was now the Poet of Mid-America, and thenceforward he sought to live up to the title by cataloguing the everyday scene in the Midwest. His poetry had been likened to Walt Whitman's; now he proceeded to imitate the least attractive aspects of Whitman's verse, producing only hot air and chaff. You are parodying yourself, his friend Joseph Warren Beach warned him. This is precisely what he was doing, with the process culminating in The People, Yes (1936), in which democratic ideology is passed off as being Poetic merely because it is personified and documented. There is no tension, no discovery. There are no people in The People, Yes; all is abstract, "typical." The single, terribly glad fish crier of the Chicago Poems is more human and credible than all the varieties of abstracted Common Men catalogued in the 107 sections of The People, Yes.

It is clear that by the early 1920s Sandburg was no longer interested in writing poems. He had become increasingly involved in prose, in particular with the life of Abraham Lincoln. Had he continued to invest in poetry the emotional capital that now went into biography, he might have developed further as a poet. But he became occupied with what turned out to be a six-volume biography of the war president. Few persons who are properly familiar with his work on Lincoln, especially with the four volumes of Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (1939), can overly regret his defection from the muse, however. (pp. 184-86)

The practice among academic historians has been to dismiss Sandburg's biography as being "useful for its poetic insights"—which, coming from an academic historian, is not intended to be a compliment, since in such circles to be "poetic" is an euphemism for being unreliable and impressionistic.

There is a sense in which such criticism is valid for the two early volumes, The Prairie Years (1926), and in particular the first of these, which is developed out of sometimes scanty factual material…. But if Sandburg erred in dealing too imaginatively with the sparse source material available for writing The Prairie Years, he would seem to have taken to heart the criticism to that effect made by book reviewers at the time of publication, for the four volumes of The War Years, while written with grace and while unfailingly interesting in presentation, are solidly anchored in abundantly recorded fact; and they seldom drift into unsubstantiated hypothesizing. They are a remarkable portrayal not only of Lincoln himself but of all the major and many of the minor figures around him…. The War Years constitutes not only a perceptive biography but a magnificently detailed history of the United States during the civil war. Academic historians may fault the work because Sandburg did not bother to annotate his sources; to the general reader this is no stumbling block at all. At times repetitious, the work contains few factual errors and is never opinionated or unfair. I know no other work on nineteenth-century American history that can surpass it for its depiction of the times and its delineation of Lincoln. I read it through again recently and was more than ever convinced of its magisterial stature. Sandburg's biography of Abraham Lincoln is a classic of our language; it puts the other biographies of the man in the shade. (pp. 186-87)

For the remainder of his days Sandburg regularly indulged in grandiloquent Yea-Saying and celebrating of the Volksgeist, becoming and remaining a kind of professional Prophet of Democracy demonstrating (so far as I am concerned) impeccable political attitudes and insufferable intellectual allegiances. He participated in all the claptrap of midcentury middlebrow liberalism, blending invocations to democracy, pseudopopulist jargon, and commercialized aesthetics in a soufflé heavily flavored with cliché. (p. 187)

The language of discovery [became] the rhetoric of advertising. The early 1960s found him out in Beverly Hills, serving as consultant for a movie on the life of Christ!

Yet in 1952 he also produced a beautiful memoir, Always the Young Strangers, chronicling his childhood and young manhood, a book written with freshness, candor, without pose or glibness. Returning to the recollection of his early days, he seemed to have sloughed off all the hokum, pretense, and self-serving rhetoric, and found his integrity still undamaged and unabated. It is almost as if there were two Carl Sandburgs, one of them the private, sensitive artist, the other the public performer, self-important and pompous, willing to debase the language for gain. (p. 188)

In 1963, at the age of eighty-five, he brought out a new volume of poetry, Honey and Salt. Astoudingly he seemed to have regained his long neglected energy as lyric poet. Here was the old vision of the real world he inhabited, a trifle dimmed perhaps but once again depicting remembered experience in new language…. Compared with the best of the early poems, only a few of those in Honey and Salt quite manage to hold their own. But the verse in Sandburg's last book is in large part interesting, genuine, alive: once again, after many years, language is being put to work.

Those who chronicle and interpret American letters are bound ultimately to rediscover for themselves the excellence of Carl Sandburg. When that happens, the fine poet and masterful biographer will at last reemerge from the dumps. There have been other poets who have written and spoken silly things—things far sillier and sometimes considerably more sinister than ever he wrote or spoke—and who have woven a public image of specious rhetoric and role-playing about their reputations, and yet been remembered finally because at their best they wrote well. (pp. 188-89)