[In the following excerpt, Weirick calls Sandburg the chief poet of the Middle West and the principal successor to Walt Whitman in American poetry.]

The chief figure in middle western poetry, the poet who unites in himself many of the interests which these other writers suggest or touch on merely, and perhaps the chief figure in American poetry since Whitman, is Carl Sandburg. In his book there is a large massiveness, a variety, and a stirring, that is vastly nearer the heart of things than either Masters' cynicism or Lindsay's optimism. Big, lumbering, Swedish, amorphic, kindly, and crude, class-conscious, and violently humanitarian, Sandburg may best be described as a clay-footed Titan. With his elephantine hands he holds now the pen of an etcher whose work is in the cool blues of Lake Michigan or in the grim red flames of those furnaces that by night illuminate her dark waters. And then, wearied with the delicacies of color and restraint, he flings the pen aside, and stalks with Cyclopean steps about the little whirling streets of his city, flinging magnetic curses, and piling job on job, and pashing out with those big unheeding feet of his whatever delicate flower of art or life is unlucky enough to come in his way. Until, tired with his debauch of strength, the Titan feels contrition, and so goes all the more tenderly back to his skillful etchings in color and flame.

Born of Swedish stock, his father a railroad worker, Carl Sandburg went to school until thirteen in Galesburg, Illinois. From then until seventeen he worked at various jobs, driving a milk wagon, portering at a barber shop, shifting scenes in a theater, working on a truck in a brick factory, making balls in a pottery. Then he went west as far as Denver, working in the wheat fields, on railroad construction gangs, as a dish-washer in hotels in Denver and Omaha, and then back to Galesburg to learn the painter's trade. The Spanish-American War sent the private at twenty-one home with ＄100. 00, and after missing a trial at West Point, he went to Lombard College in Galesburg for his degree. There he edited his college paper and got interested in poetry, politics, and newspapers, and in all three fields he has labored since. His first book, Chicago Poems, 1916, created immediate attention as the chants of a vital revolutionist, able to some extent to bend the bow of Walt Whitman. Corn Huskers, 1918, Smoke and Steel, 1920, and Slabs of the Sunburnt West, 1922, have deepened that impression, and added to it that of an amorphic giant who is master of a new thing—the etching done in color.

Would you see him in his finest manner as the skillful and loving etcher, read in Chicago Poems so slight a sketch as the following justly celebrated fragment.

“FOG”

The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

Or in Cornhuskers read “Cool Tombs,” where slang and beauty combine in a spiritual union to show the poet at his best. There is an elation and peace here quite beyond the powers of most modern poets.

COOL TOMBS

When Abraham Lincoln was shoveled into the tombs, he forgot the copperheads and the assassin. … in the dust, in the cool tombs.
And Ulysses Grant lost all thought of con men and Wall Street, cash and collateral turned ashes, … in the dust, in the cool tombs.
Pocahontas' body, lovely as a poplar, sweet as a red haw in November or a pawpaw in May, did she wonder? does she remember? … in the dust, in the cool tombs?
Take any streetful of people buying clothes and groceries, cheering a hero or throwing confetti and blowing tin horns … tell me if the lovers are losers … tell me if they get more than the lovers … in the dust … in the cool tombs.

And what artlessness and what art in the following seemingly random musings in Slabs of the Sunburnt West.

“WASHINGTON MONUMENT AT NIGHT”

1

The stone goes straight.
A lean swimmer dives into night sky,
Into half-moon mist.

2

Two trees are coal black.
This is a great white ghost between.
It is cool to look at.
Strong men, strong women, come here.

3

Eight years is a long time
To be fighting all the time.

4

The republic is a dream.
Nothing happens unless first a dream.

5

The wind bit hard at Valley Forge one Christmas.
Soldiers tied rags on their feet.
Red footprints wrote on the snow …
… and stone shoots into stars here
… into half-moon mist to-night.

6

Tongues wrangled dark at a man.
He buttoned his overcoat and stood alone.
In a snowstorm, red hollyberries, thought,
                    he stood alone.

7

Women said: He is lonely
… fighting … fighting … eight years …

8

The name of an iron man goes over the world.
It takes a long time to forget an iron man.

9

And then in daring contrast, to see Mr. Sandburg in his more barbaric manner, read the Billy Sunday imitation and criticism, “To a Contemporary Bunk Shooter”; or read “Wilderness,” a poem that, after a specific enumeration of the animals that ark-wise inhabit the breast of the poet, ends with the following interior climax:

“O, I got a zoo, I got a menagerie inside my ribs, under my bony head, under my red-valve heart … and I got something else: it is a man-child heart, a woman-child heart: it is a father and mother and lover: it came from God-knows-where; it is going to God-knows-where—For I am the keeper of the zoo: I say yes and no: I sing and kill and work: I am a pal of the world: I came from the wilderness.”

And in like strain, but with much more of the fat and gristle of Chicago in it, look at

“GALOOTS”

Galoots, you hairy, hankering,
Snousle on the bones you eat, chew at the gristle and lick the last of it.
Grab off the bones in the paws of other galoots … hook your claws in their sleazy mouths—snap and run.
If long-necks sit on their rumps and sing wild cries to the winter moon, chasing their tails to the flickers of foolish stars … let 'em howl.
Galoots fat with too much, galoots lean with too little, galoot millions and millions, snousle and snicker on, plug your exhausts, hunt your snacks of fat and lean, grab off yours.

This is certainly like and yet unlike Walt Whitman. His precepts it puts into practice, though it is, after all, not much in his spirit. This joy in crudity was not quite his. Nor was the class hatred, the bolshevik desire to level, seen in these and the following poems, one of Whitman's desires. His democracy was saner, better proportioned, less Titanic. The man who writes “Gargoyle” has revolution in his heart, as well as a kind of wild love, and would, at least for the moment, as soon lynch as reform the capitalist.

“GARGOYLE”

I saw a mouth jeering. A smile of melted red iron ran over it. Its laugh was full of nails rattling. It was a child's dream of a mouth.
A fist hit the mouth: knuckles of gun-metal driven by an electric wrist and shoulder. It was a child's dream of an arm.
The fist hit the mouth over and over, again and again. The mouth bled melted iron and laughed its laughter of nails rattling.
And I saw the more the fist pounded the more the mouth laughed. The fist is pounding and pounding, and the mouth answering.

That certainly, whatever one thinks of its doctrine, is as superb a piece of industrial symbolism as one can wish! In “Soup,” there is even more of the revolutionist's ironic scorn. How easily greatness is tumbled down to the common level! And what cool delight the author takes in bagging it.

“SOUP”

I saw a famous man eating soup.
I say he was lifting a fat broth
Into his mouth with a spoon.
His name was in the newspaper that day
Spelled out in tall black headlines
And thousands of people were talking about him.
                              When I saw him
He sat bending his head over a plate
Putting soup in his mouth with a spoon.

Though perhaps too that is a bit pathetic!

Dislike of the rich, love of the common man, of the dirty and oppressed, passionate dislike and violent love, these are two of Mr. Sandburg's favorite motives; though he is so opulent an artist that he is not limited to these. He glories in the glamors and brutalities of Chicago, the city he describes in his most famous poem, as “Hog butcher for the world; the Stormy, husky, brawling City of the Big Shoulders,” and another view of which again in his latest volume, Slabs of the Sunburnt West he elaborates with beauty and exhilaration as “The Windy City,” where by the turquoise lake

“The living lighted skyscrapers stand
Spotting the blue dusk with checkers of yellow.”

And a little later on with what rare beauty he combines the hog motive with this swift little dream of other cities! And yet by some magic it does not seem incongruous.

“It is easy to come here a stranger and show the whole works, write a book, fix it all up—it is easy to come and go away a muddle-headed pig, a bum and a bag of wind.
Go to it and remember this city fished from its depths a text: ‘Independent as a hog on ice.’
Venice is a dream of soft waters, Vienna and Bagdad recollections of dark spears and wild turbans; Paris is a thought in Monet gray on scabbards, fabrics, façades; London is a fact in a fog filled with the moaning of transatlantic whistles; Berlin sits amid white scrubbed quadrangles and torn arithmetics and testaments; Moscow brandishes a flag and repeats a dance figure of a man who walks like a bear.
Chicago fished from its depths a text: ‘Independent as a hog on ice.’”

Sandburg glories in the tang of reality, wishes to swear at you, get you dirty, kick you, and strip you of your civilizing reticences, just as Chicago does. He is a rough democrat in his way, and sings of the slums, of its niggers and dagoes and Greeks, and greasers, its pimps and harlots, and bulls, as well as of its dance halls, naked prize-fighters, mothers suckling the young, and Jews selling fish “with a joy identical to that of Pavlowa's dancing.” Here, indeed, if anywhere, is the saturation and gusto of Chicago!

Yet not all is sordid. There is even in some of these red-flag lyrics a warm friendliness, and touches of the mysticism of time and change. Everybody, for instance, must like Jack, the hero of one of Sandburg's shoulder-clapping sketches in Chicago Poems, a “swarthy, swaggering son-of-a-gun” who had a hard life and was happy. And how admirable too when one finds this rude poet sensitive to spiritual feelings, to touches of mysticism, to the presence of the unseen powers that work behind the veil. “A Fence” gives us something of these feelings, showing us time and nature in their classic rôles again as the greatest of democrats.

“A FENCE”

Now the stone house on the lake front is finished and the workmen are beginning the fence.
The palings are made of iron bars with steel points that can stab the life out of any man who falls on them.
As a fence, it is a masterpiece, and will shut off the rabble and all vagabonds and hungry men and all wandering children looking for a place to play.
Passing through the bars and over the steel points will go nothing except Death and the Rain and To-morrow.

The cosmic symbolism of that is memorable.

What, then, is Sandburg? A humanitarian revolutionist who can do etchings in color, he has made himself the poet of Chicago, and so by implication, the poetical historian of the Middle West, its spirit, its strength, its revolutionary gusto and range. His barbaric naturalism has more tang and bite than Whitman's and is more suited to the uses of an industrial democracy than Whitman's is. There is an arrogance here, a violent strong-armed view of life, which the life in the mills, and hard sordid labor with machinery, has bred in us. This arrogance Sandburg links to the wilderness. By the machine route he has gone back to nature, a more raging, but a less luminous nature than Whitman's. Yet Sandburg's nature, too, has its beauty, the beauty of tooth and claw, of a field of daisies inhabited by wolves. His is, in short, the nature of revolutions, beautiful, terrible, and fascinating.

Such a nature is implicit in his characters. Such a nature is, he would have us believe, at the heart of Chicago, with, underneath it, a strange tenderness and hunger, which perhaps even the wolf shows to her own. Whether or not these Titans in time will bring in a revolution, an industrial democracy which shall be very stern against greed, wars to end war, and what a Georgia legislator termed “the poodle-petting classes,” of course no man can say. That such a movement once agitated many, and produced a very surprising poet, these four volumes of Sandburg will for some time bear witness.

What does the rise of the Middle West in our literature mean, besides a volume of more or less excellent poetry? In the first place it means vigor. Rude actuality is in all these poets. They sing the life that they see about them, and fly the imitative, the merely pretty, or sweet. Secondly, it means that a robust even if somewhat barbaric Americanism is again vocal. These are no library democrats! They sing America working, fighting the capitalist, aspiring, and they call on the ghosts of Washington and Lincoln to aid in establishing a new, an industrial democracy. They aspire too to see America artistic, to see her play as well as work, to see her really what her “patriots” pretend that she is. Morally, Sandburg and Masters desire a more liberal freedom. They disapprove of Puritan repressions, and desire free play for the emotions. In their views of the rôle of sex in life they are more radical than their poetical confreres. Though their poetry is alive, and pulsing with an industrial, human, and national consciousness, it is also poetry of Titanism, violent, aspiring, revolutionary. In much of it there breathes the spirit of brutal irony, the rage to destroy as well as build, that violent romanticism that would tear away life's veils, and in the very lust of honesty discover if there is anything behind the veil but fear, or greed, or nakedness, or death. Lindsay's exuberant optimism and Sarett's warm Indian lyricism contrast strangely with the rapport of Masters and Sandburg.

In the worship of force and the glamour of bigness and strength, in the fierce aspirations for economic as well as human democracy, in the love of art and play unchecked by morality, and in the Bohemian view of sex, we have some of the elements of our aspiring middle-western Titanism. B. L. T. alone in any real sense has been a conservative counter-irritant. The sunny malice with which he has tilted at their too vulnerable windmills has given him often a light and easy victory. To a Passionate Professor, Say It with Flowers, The Passional Note, and Canopus are good examples of his sly art in the poetic tournament. It is an exhilarating thing for a region to find itself becoming as the Middle West has in recent years almost volcanically vocal. It will be still greater, if after the ash has had time to settle, and the roar and glow have a little abated, there remain a few scarlet poppies blooming in the fields where the soft still wood-notes of Pan may yet be heard by an attentive ear. In Sandburg's nocturnes, in Lindsay's Nightingale, and in Sarett's Indian melody we have, I suspect, about the only poppies that time's wind will not wither very soon.