CARL SANDBURG, ROUGHNECK SINGER

Carl Sandburg is almost unread today, when he is not a laughingstock, among those who still read poetry. The charges against him are severe, and of many of them his poetry stands convicted. Yet there are many other poets, poets who are read (or at least taught) and whose reputations are higher, who are equally guilty. During his lifetime, Sandburg's work was taken seriously by many whose business it is to take poetry seriously. And—what is not true of others—Sandburg was one of the most genuinely popular American poets of this century.

In some ways it is difficult to write about Sandburg without sounding an apologia. It may be true that his intellectual capacity was slight and his capacity for sentimentality great. His imagery is jejune, his philosophizing worse. His poetry is far too dependent on nouns and adjectives and not enough on verbs. It contains copious description and yet little imagery. His lyrics are not lovely, his narratives have no dramatic tension, his meditations lack depth. His longer poems are almost entirely shapeless, and he has a tin ear.

All this and more is readily conceded. But it was Whitman who wrote, “The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.” However much he liked to affect the lingo of a bumpkin, Sandburg was not ignorant of the rules. He broke them deliberately in the interests of a larger intention, something poets have done since poetry was named. For Sandburg, this most Whit/manic of poets, the drift was everything. It carried him far.

But where? Toward the creation of an American myth. Stubborn as a Swede (and he was fond of ethnic characterizations), Sandburg had one subject: America, meaning the United States, and one politic: radical democracy. Beyond that, his policy like Lincoln's was “not to have a policy.” Accordingly, he took everything that came in his line of vision or experience—a great grab bag of people, ideas, objects, landscapes—and tried to make of it a mythic expression of America and its people.

Myth is an expression of “primitive” people, people in the process of making what we call civilization, and its purpose is to explain and support them against the darkness. Sandburg took the long view, saw the country as young, its people still in the process of forging an identity, of testing and examining the possibilities of who they might become. The time in his poetry is therefore the present—and the future. Even in his historical poems he does not dwell on the past but uses it as an exploration of what might come next.

Myth is also a counter against mortality in a world in which life is “solitary, nasty, poor, brutish, and short.” Death is a constant presence in Sandburg's poems, and this is significant in a poet who has been read as an optimist. Nor does he emphasize only human frailty on an individual scale, but also constant is the consciousness of death of whole peoples, nations, civilizations. Sandburg's emphasis on the solitude, brevity, and transitoriness of all things human is almost Greek in its proportions.

Myths are also composed—if they are “composed” and not built by accretion, like deltas—by anonymous authors. It would never occur to us to wonder, for example, who wrote the one about Demeter and Persephone. Nobody wrote it. Everybody did. It doesn't matter.

And herein we begin to define the difference between Whitman and Sandburg. A century apart, each chose the same subjects and many of the same attitudes and methods—traveled the same ground, as it were. It was even the same act of optimism or faith for each to publish his major work when he did. Leaves of Grass first appeared in 1855, when the country was rushing toward civil war and possible dissolution. Sandburg brought out The People, Yes in 1936, when it was by no means clear that the country would survive as an economic or political entity. An American myth—yes. Democracy—yes.

But the voice through which Whitman's oracle spoke was not anonymous, unknowable, terrifying, like the oracle at Delphi. Leaves of Grass had a distinctive voice, highly idiosyncratic and personal (difficult and contradictory as that was), and it was Whitman's own. Its hero was The Poet, the visionary and seer who could prophesy the promised land. Sandburg's voice is altogether different from this; it strives to melt into the anonymous voices of the people; its ideal is not the particular but the general—or the universal, if you will. Lincoln was Sandburg's personal hero, but Sandburg's poetry is distinguished largely by Lincoln's absence. The hero of Sandburg's work is not Lincoln but the people, “democracy en masse.” Hence, it lacks the concern, so striking in Whitman, for the self, the I, the ego, the personality. In this sense, at least, Sandburg's voice was more essentially mythic than Whitman's. Thus, Sandburg is not a later and weaker clone of Whitman. Rather, he is more like Allen Ginsberg—a new hybrid grafted from the original tree.

In general, Sandburg's best poems are also his best-known poems: “Chicago,” “Slabs of the Sunburnt West,” “Good Morning America,” and “The People, Yes.”¹ All are long versions of incantations, invocations, and chants (primitive prayers) written in favor of ancient verities and sometimes flung into the void of an indifferent universe. Their language is a peculiar mix of the slangy lingo of a low-down cuss combined with the intonation of a preacher or priest; half of it is reminiscent of the speech of “Waiting for Lefty” while the other half is derived from ancient texts like the Bible. Choosing at random a few lines from a Sandburg poem, the first half might look like this: “Go to it” and “independent as a hog on ice.” An example of the second half is this: “Remember this city” and “fished from its depths” and “a text.” Combined as Sandburg wrote them in “The Windy City,” the lines are these:

Go to it and remember this city fished from its
          depths a text: “independent as a hog on ice.”(2)

The poems are constructed like ancient religious rituals: slow, deliberately repetitious, the main chant-line changing slightly each time it is brought around again, sparks from the bonfire shooting occasionally into the circle of celebrants, the climax building, reached, then released in a final coda. The whole appears loose enough to permit spontaneity and also varying lengths, depending on the needs of each performance (though on the page the poems are presented in full).

I have no doubt that Sandburg consciously strove to recall and reclaim in an utterly American context both the lyric and epic voices of the ancient Greeks. “Good Morning, America” is an example.³ It is crammed with American folk tales, tall tales, and legends, from Paul Bunyan to Sleepy Hollow, used in various versions, with proverbs, aphorisms, epigrams, and fables, commercials, slogans, pamphleteering, huckstering, folk songs, and hymns. It utilizes almost everything that Sandburg can find or think of which can be placed or identified as in some way American. Yet its central trope plays on the theme of mutability and its closing section is a kind of hymn to the earth.⁴

A myth is not made by a single voice but by a chorus of voices over time; it also requires a community, a system of shared values which we as Americans may not have. It may also be the product of a more finite world than the one in which we live. Or Sandburg's failure, truth be told, may simply be the result of his own shortcomings as a poet.

But his popularity in his lifetime seems to me indicative of something—that Sandburg, like Will Rogers, Charlie Chaplin, and a few others, touched a deep and responsive chord in common people, in common American people, to whom all his work was dedicated. Sandburg tried to speak to them and for them in their own various and anonymous voices, for he believed that art as well as American politics was a radical experiment in democracy. His poetry was intended as a modest contribution to that experiment.

Notes

1. From The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg, found respectively at pp. 3, 307, 320, 439. This list is meant to be more indicative than definitive. “Fog,” while well known, is omitted from the list. It is one of Sandburg's better lyrics, principally because he resisted the temptation to add what would have been a more characteristic last line, something like “So the fog comes.” In general, I think Sandburg's better poems are the longer ones.

2. From The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg, p. 271.

3. Ibid., p. 320.

4. “The People, Yes” is omitted from this discussion because it is a book-length poem and I cannot hope to do justice to it here. The points I would make about it parallel those I have made about “Good Morning, America,” and I note that its ending, almost in recognition of the myth-making process, is open. (ibid., p. 617)