SOURCE: Kreymborg, Alfred. “Springfield, Spoon River and the Prairies.” In Our Singing Strength: A History of American Poetry, pp. 368-94. New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1934.

… In 1914, Harriet Monroe's Poetry issued a group of poems by a stranger named Carl Sandburg. It included the ode to the “Hog Butcher for the World,” Chicago. A lanky galoot, with a bang over one eye, had finally arrived: he was thirty-six at the time. One recalls the violent sensation the group aroused. What right had any man to be so brutal in print, and what right had our most brutal city to such eulogies? How in the name of America could culture continue if it fell into the hands of Swedes and stevedores and picked up the slang of filthy Mid-Western pavements? And what was a poetry magazine doing out there in the jungles, with a woman, two women, at the head? The next thing the effete East had to hear was that Chicago had become the literary capital of the nation: egregious absurdity, scandalous braggadocio. But this terrible event had actually occurred, and New York had gone the way of Philadelphia and Boston. One man, more than any other, had been responsible for the catastrophe: this son of an emigrant Swede, this child of a place called Galesburg, this truck-handler, scene-shifter, dish-washer, harvester, soldier and graduate of a college named Lombard. (Shades of John Harvard and Elihu Yale!) Then he wrote ads for a department store, became a Socialist, and a newspaperman. Whatever else he may have dropped, he never deserted the newspapers. What had all this to do with poetry—the poetry of Greece and so on? Absolutely nothing. But it had more to do with the new American poetry than the work of any other man since Whitman. Walt had declaimed against “ladylike words.” A vigorous fellow had answered the call. In deleting such words, the strange poet had not eliminated tenderness. Here, then, was an odd mixture of fortissimi and pianissimi, with a musician at the core of both.

Here, too, was a practical, not a theoretical democrat: a romantic realist deeply moved by emotions, but intuitive enough to give them a plastic shape. He mastered the lyric forms for which he had gone to school with Pound and the Imagists. He never reached old Walt in the larger forms, but he surpassed the Imagists in the smaller. He humanized Imagism and tempered Walt's passionate creed with the salt of irony. One has a feeling that Sandburg is closer than Whitman to people as they are. He loves them as romantically, but not quite so blindly. Walt was the prophet of the race, Walt himself was democracy. Sandburg is the bard of the race, the lyric companion of its by no means perfect character. His speech is a rhythmic reflection of the raciest speech ever set singing by an American. Sandburg's poems are thoroughly melodious. Stark, brutal, tender, ironic, mystical, slangy, dramatic or reportorial, they are always melodious. Critics who praise him like to conclude that Sandburg is purely emotional; that his intellect is negligible. It may be limited for critical purposes, but in the more important domain of self-criticism, it is usually large enough. He has complete command of his emotions, the process of a man who thinks as well as feels. He will never qualify as an intellectual poet, simply because an intellectual experience does not suffice for Sandburg. At heart, he is a man of the streets, not of the studio. But the room he works in is the room of an artist. After the subconscious has poured forth its visions and emotions, the conscious labors over the ultimate form. Matter and manner are beautifully wedded.

In Chicago Poems, issued in 1916, loyalty to the poor is first sounded in “Masses”: “more patient than crags, tides, and stars.” Their fate is

To work, broken and smothered, for bread and wages,
To eat dust in their throats and die empty-hearted
For a little handful of pay on a few Saturday nights.

Never merely propagandistic, this poetry is as potent as the most learned treatise on Socialism. Every other page, apparently, is devoted to the worker, and the best pages are the portraits, or such single lines as “How many cents for the sleepy eyes and fingers?” “The Fish Crier,” “terribly glad to be selling fish”; ten men watching some sweating slaves and saying, “Oh, it's a hell of a job,” and ten others sighing, “Jesus, I wish I had the job”; a “dago shovelman … eating a noon meal of bread and bologna,” and keeping the road-bed clear so trains may whirl by with people eating steaks “running with brown gravy”; the bum who has married Mag and given her children, and now wishes to God he had never seen her; the Onion Days of Mrs. Gabrielle Giovannitti; Anna Imroth, a factory girl burned to death thanks to “the hand of God and the lack of fire escapes”; Mamie, dreaming of getting to Chicago, and once she is there, dreaming of places where real dreams never go to smash; “undertakers, hearse drivers, grave diggers” earning a living through “those who say good-bye to-day in thin whispers”; dynamiters, ice handlers, niggers, movie fans, skyscrapers; and the attack on the “contemporary bunkshooter,” Billy Sunday:

Where do you get that stuff?
What do you know about Jesus?

And the poems written at the outbreak of the World War: “Killers,” “Statistics,” “Buttons,” “Jaws,” “Wars” and “Iron”—in which guns do the work of death and shovels the work of burial. And the exquisite etchings called “Handfuls,” in which sentiment deftly plays, and also sentimentality. “The fog comes on little cat feet,” and

Crimson is the slow smolder of the cigar end I hold,
Gray is the ash that stiffens and covers all silent the fire.

Here, round the corner of tumultuous life, is something beyond: the mystic Sandburg greeting “the dust of the traveled road,” and praising a man who died alone: “And only the undertaker came to his funeral.” Truth is “the most elusive captive in the universe.” The poet simply hints at it; leaves it for his fellows to solve. Whatever little there may be, here or hereafter, there are “Fogs And Fires,” “the coming of a little love,” “a beautiful friend who remembers,” a moon to “shake out more and more silver changes.” “Summer and the sun commend you.” There is even something for the women of the night: “It is much to be warm and sure of to-morrow.” Better, surely, than the woman who has “no takers,” or the one who confesses:

“Some men got it all,
Every night's hustlin' I ever did.”

Then there are the closing poems, dated 1900 to 1910. Sandburg had written free verse before Pound sailed abroad:

I am glad God saw Death
And gave Death a job taking care of all who are tired of living.

Cornhuskers is a clear advance over Chicago Poems. The adventures are broader, the imagination keener, the artistry more certain. The self has become mellowed through communion with the other fellow, mountains, plains, cities, civilization, barbarism; and through passion, tenderness, observation, humor, irony. Each plays its phrase in the tune that is Sandburg. “Prairie,” the long opening poem, is composed of glorious patches and irreconcilable journalese. I feel the same contradiction in the other long poems: “The Four Brothers” and “Potato-Blossom Songs And Jigs.” Sandburg is essentially a lyrist, and the lyrism is sporadically interrupted. He rarely sustains a theme at great length; in this he falls below Whitman.

The story lags.
The story has no connections.
The story is nothing but a lot of plinka planka plunks.

“River Roads” introduces Sandburg's skillful use of repetition; “Prairie Waters” his instinct for harmonious sensations of eye and ear; “Early Moon” his devotion to mysticism in a translation of the past in terms of the future. The wonder-breathing “Caboose Thoughts,” “It's going to come out all right—do you know?” marches erect to the colloquial close: “They get along—and we'll get along.” The Sandburg heaven is nothing but the common street seen upside down.

“Wilderness” is a symbol of many sided self-hood: his zoo contains wolf, fox, hog, fish, baboon, eagle and mocking-bird. Folk who grow soft with horror in the presence of egoism will find this blast distasteful. Individualists will frame it over their beds, lest they forget the refrain, “I came from the wilderness,” and its visionary twin, “I am a pal of the world.” In immediate contrast, comes “Chicago Poet”: “I saluted a nobody—I saw him in a looking glass.” An egoist knows himself so heartily that he has your true humility. Further “persons half known” include Nancy Hanks, Inez Milholland, Adelaide Crapsey, Don Magregor, “Southern Pacific” Huntington and “Southern Pacific” Blithery, Buffalo Bill, Jazbo the singing nigger, and Child Janet and Child Margaret, the two Sandburgians to whom the book is dedicated. The songs hobnob with a rogue's gallery of moods, in which the poet himself is one of the jail-bird cronies. In “Chicago Poet,” he steps out of his cell for a sunny morning with his kind, and in “Jazbo,” he goes back to the tune of, “I went away asking where I came from.”

“Leather Leggings” shows man in his multifarious activity making “the ball of earth—a small thing.” It is the history of science reduced to a poem. The same adventure rises out of “Prayers Of Steel,” from “Lay me on an anvil, O God,” to “Let me be the great nail holding a skycraper through blue nights into white stars.” The first group is the America of open spaces, this third group the America of cities. It is felt by an American, partly a Swede, and expressed in the American language, partly English: such is the inference in “Jabberers”: “I rise out of the depths of my language.” The title, “Psalm Of Those Who Go Forth Before Daylight,” explains itself. There are slants at many towns: Keokuk, Buffalo, the Springfield of Lincoln and Lindsay, Joliet, Natchez, New Orleans. “Testament” closes the group. It is cheerily addressed to “undertakers, the nanny and billy goats, the blue smoke of flowers and the dirty-fisted children” who have the disposal of Sandburg's remains in their keeping.

The fourth group, “Haunts,” is a mellifluous love group. It is epitomized in the line: “To-day, let me be mono-syllabic … a crony of old men who wash sunlight in their fingers and enjoy slow-pacing clocks.” “Mammy Hums” is as beautiful a thing as free verse has ever contributed to poetry; unless you prefer “Handfuls,” a cameo of “baby-red gamblers” drifting on to “gray gamblers, handfuls again.” The war group, “Shenandoah,” is inferior to the other groups. Propaganda is a little too apparent. But “Old Timers” and the brutal “Gargoyle” are authentic art. The last speech in “Grass,” “I am the grass, let me work,” reveals the Sandburg song coming up through our future soil, when everyday poets and poetic controversy are laid away.

Smoke And Steel, an even finer book than Cornhuskers, is Sandburg's finest volume. The man and artist have reached maturity. The title poem is a vivid panorama of the building of cities through the blood of men: “Liners on the sea, skyscrapers on the land; diving steel in the sea, climbing steel in the sky.”

A bar of steel—it is only
Smoke at the heart of it, smoke and the blood of a man.

Smoke carries the poet's vision beyond reality. He is more obsessed with searching the unknown, and though he comes back empty-handed, he returns to the quest, marching and chanting:

You may put the damper up,
You may put the damper down,
The smoke goes up the chimney just the same.

Here, for almost the first time, is an acceptance of machinery and its implications: “smoke into steel and blood into steel.” No man knows more about the horror of factory cells, the tortured slavery of labor. No man hates injustice with a fiercer hatred; he is no pallid intellectual. Holding constant conversations with death, he knows what it is after, and greets the end of the World War by noting a “rusty gun on the wall.”

It will be spoken about among half-forgotten, wished-to-be-forgotten things.
They will tell the spider: “Go on, you're doing good work.”

The selfsame universal spider will draw “a silver string nest” over the people and things the poet has loved. Only the good lovers are worth remembering: Jonah, Nero, Sinbad, Nebuchadnezzar, Jack Cade, John Brown, Jesse James. The nations at war were a pack of lions; they will go the way of the older nations. He says it all in the best of his longer poems: “Four Preludes On Playthings Of The Wind.” Strangely enough, this chant owes a good deal to a comparatively obscure American poet: Wallace Stevens. As the work of Sandburg grew more esthetic, he came under the influence of this most esthetic American: a glorious dandy who has issued but one volume, with little more than a hundred buyers. We shall come to “Harmonium” later. The first prelude is Stevens simplified by Sandburg:

The woman named To-morrow
sits with a hairpin in her teeth
and takes her time
and does her hair the way she wants it
and fastens at last the last braid and coil
and puts the hairpin where it belongs
and turns and drawls: Well, what of it?
My grandmother, Yesterday, is gone.
What of it? Let the dead be dead.

The second prelude describes doors of cedar and panels of gold bearing the inscription:

We are the greatest city,
and the greatest nation:
nothing like us ever was.

“Sheets of rain swish through on the wind” where this America stood. The third prelude shows the fate of older nations who sang of their own greatness: “the only listeners left now are … the rats … and the lizards.” The fourth prelude concludes, beginning with a motif out of Stevens:

And the wind shifts
and the dust on a doorsill shifts
and even the writing of the rat footprints
tells us nothing, nothing at all
about the greatest city, the greatest nation
where the strong men listened
and the women warbled: Nothing like us ever was.

This is a long distance from the jubilant Whitman who endured the intimate horrors of the Civil War and emerged, broken in health but strengthened in confidence. Sandburg responded to the tragic disillusionment of the World War. Whitman rose at the birth of the nation; Sandburg grew up in the midst of its vast development and vaster braggadocio, and saw that much of the vastness was hollow, many of the claims superficial. His view of the nation is fully as patriotic as Walt's. No land is in need of skepticism more than successful America.

Slabs of the Sunburnt West is inferior to the first three volumes. But the misgivings which attacked the poet's admirers, doubts akin to those occasioned by the later books of Pound, Lindsay and Masters, were recently relieved by Good Morning, America. There are good things among the Slabs, but the rest of the book is sketchy, repetitious, rather weary. The long poem, “Windy City,” does not compare with the early “Chicago.” The slang section is overdrawn. But the poem on the unknown soldier, “And So To-day,” is a parade of masterly invectives against the rulers and orators of the land:

The honorable orators,
Always the honorable orators,
Buttoning the buttons on their prinz alberts,
Pronouncing the syllables “sac-ri-fice,”
Juggling those bitter salt-soaked syllables—
Do they ever gag with hot ashes in their mouths?

A movie camera man responds:

“Feed it to 'em,
they lap it up,
bull … bull … bull.”

The title poem is another study of American dissolution. It is rather disappointing on the whole. “At The Gates Of Tombs” says more in one page, or more in two lines:

Civilizations are set up and knocked down
the same as pins in a bowling alley.

Time has familiarized the Sandburg adventures: one expects little that has not been heard before. In spying a book with the slogan, Good Morning, America, one is delighted that things may still lie ahead for Walt's leading descendant. In the six years since Slabs of the Sunburnt West, he has been strenuously busy with the huge biography of Lincoln, with Rootabaga Stories for children, with Songbags and such, and now one catches gossip concerning a monumental novel on an American tragedy. Except for the periodical appearance of a sketchy poem, Sandburg the poet had vanished among the realms of poetic prose. But here, thanks to the Swede in his arteries, is a stout book of poems at last, with greetings to nearly everything under the American sun. I opened the volume with misgivings inspired by my younger and wiser neighbors. Most of them had sent it to the scrap-heap after skimming a dozen poems. I closed it quite contentedly—certain that though the prairie galoot had added little to the Sandburg of old, that little holds much for the imagination to thrive on.

What the book has gained over its predecessors is mostly a firmer handling of the materials of life. The technical equipment is equal to the varying demands of pure form in free verse. No sonneteer could do better with the kindred severities of classical versification. Lines, phrases, syllables, consonants, vowels, all things interweave harmoniously. The artist has grown mellow. The soil has been conquered. The style has caught trees and people in a form thoroughly original and thoroughly a part of the race. But one regrets somewhat this final perfection. It begins to sound dangerously repetitious in places. The man may still adventure, but the style will cling too tenaciously. It has become a convention. And yet, if one looks a little closer, goes a little deeper, one finds something to offset whatever one holds against the over-refinement of form. Sandburg has accepted life in toto. He has done so with open eyes in the head of his wide-open temperament. This book has none of the jauntiness of the Chicago poems of twelve years ago. The man is elbow to elbow, arm in arm, with all things. He neither accepts nor denies. Things are and he is. He goes with them and they with him, and all intermingle and move at an almost impersonal gait. There is nothing which has not its death; nothing dead which has not its life. The mystic has a vision, and the vision is all-embracing. And the heart of the vision is tender in the richest, strongest connotation of that old, disreputable word.

Amid the apparent disillusionment America has forced on his faith, there is a sturdy acceptance of the truth about the mad land no man has ever loved more. On the surface, this book has a tragic air, a heartbreaking threnody. But Sandburg knows his people are merely as human as the Babylonians, the Jews, the Romans. And being human, now, heretofore and hereafter, he hobnobs with one and all. The song lies where it should lie: between tragedy and comedy. There is never the one nor the other, but both together, indivisible. Though oblivion steal the best gift of all—love and the heart that goes with it—everlasting night has not yet arrived. There is still a salute for the morrow, and the same ruddy change ready to grow to the same old sameness. There's no hurry about farewells. We part with nothing the older races have not parted with before. There's still no occasion for the inevitable epitaph. “Money isn't everything.” There's still something to say good morning to. Even America. But one has to be a little more cautious, a little more cagey, than formerly. One is not quite so crazy as one was before the World War. A bit of wisdom has tempered the adolescent years.

Are you happy? It's the only way to be, kid.
Yes, be happy, it's a good nice way to be.
But not happy-happy, kid, don't be too doubled-up doggone happy.
It's the doubled-up doggone happy-happy people … bust hard
                    … they do bust hard … when they bust.
Be happy, kid, go to it, but not too doggone happy.