SOURCE: Basler, Roy P. “Your Friend the Poet—Carl Sandburg.” Midway 10, no. 2 (autumn 1969): 3-15.

[In the following essay, Basler appraises Sandburg as a poet outside of the literary establishment.]

For the period of my life during which I was engaged in editing The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, it was my fortune to operate in and from a suite of offices in the First National Bank Building of what has been known with pride, locally at least, as “Lincoln's Home Town.” One day, as I entered the elevator on the way up, I was greeted by a lawyer from the adjoining office, with the news that “Your friend the poet is upstairs looking for you.” For it was as a poet that Carl Sandburg was known then, and I think, will continue to be known for a long time to come, in spite of critical opinion at present heavily to the contrary.

If everyone in Springfield, Illinois, did not recognize Carl's “phyzzog,” certainly his was the most generally known face of a living poet, there as elsewhere, in the United States. From granitic sculpture in moments of concentration or anger, to magical mobility in humor or friendship, it was a face you did not forget, not for the least reason by way of the silver lock hanging just over his left eye, which Robert Frost always insisted was barbered thus by careful design. And it was first of all a poet's face, its enigma best described by the man who saw it in the looking glass and wrote about it in the poem “Chicago Poet.”

I said, ‘Hello, I know you.’
And I was a liar to say so.

The one thing I recall best of what I felt about Sandburg's poetry before I came to know him personally was that the man who wrote the poems was my guy, even when I didn't exactly like something he said. Usually, I got around to admitting that the way he said it was a good way, or even sometimes a splendid way, even if nobody else in the world would have said it that way, but then I learned to love Sandburg's poetry the same way I learned to love Keats's poetry, not by taking somebody's word for it but by reading it and finding it out for myself, sometimes not easily recognizing how it was being done, or why. For me, he had one thing above all others in common with Keats, that although frequently I could not have tolerated how it was said from anyone else, it was what the guy said that counted, because it was genuine.

Like Mark Twain, Sandburg is a do-it-yourself great writer who found his first inspiration not in literature but in life. Not that he didn't learn from others, Whitman and Li Po for instance, but that like them he was bothered about what he wanted to say enough to try to find his own way of saying it. On every page, in every poem (nearly, if not quite) his communication is one to one in a human kinship that carries over, if one is concerned about what he has to say. Frankly, some are not concerned.

2

In the year before Sandburg's death, the professor-critic Gorham Munson stated, “It is doubtful if anything written in 1966 will raise the drooping reputation of Sandburg.” Certainly nothing Munson or any of his professorial colleagues wrote had that effect on Sandburg's reputation, for Munson represents very well the academic establishment which has produced a formidable bibliography of critiques and explications of nearly everything T. S. Eliot ever wrote, but which has continued to sneer at or at best patronize Sandburg's allegedly bad poetry. One can count on fingers without using any digit more than once the number of serious critical studies of Sandburg's poetry during the last twenty years.

Buried under the avalanche of honorary degrees, medals, and prizes which followed publication of his Abraham Lincoln: The War Years in 1939, Sandburg was assumed by the poet-critics to have found his true profession as historian. It is a matter of fact that the historian-critics were usually far more generous in bestowing critical accolades for that incontestably great work, in spite of its recognizable shortcomings, than most of the poet-critics had ever been in assessing any of his several volumes of poetry.

From the beginning Sandburg had to become accustomed to being lectured by everyone, from Amy Lowell (for his failure to know the difference between poetry and propaganda) and Conrad Aiken (“He spills in the chaff with the wheat” and fails to recognize that “ethics and art cannot be married”) to Carl Van Doren, who avowed his genius but lamented his lack of discrimination: “To go through his books is to stumble again and again upon heaps of slag, ore never quite melted. … Yet here and there from these piles of slag emerge objects of a strangely authentic beauty.” It is remarkable how the critics so often take refuge in metaphor to convey what is wrong with Sandburg's poetry.

In the year 1950, when Sandburg's Complete Poems appeared, the highbrow quarterlies ignored the event, with one or two exceptions to be noticed later. The New York Times chose a historian, Henry Commager, and the Herald Tribune a playwright, Robert Sherwood, to do appreciations for the common reader. In the Saturday Review of Literature, poet-critic Selden Rodman wrote lukewarmly but perceptively that “on the acceptance of ‘The People, Yes’ (1935) Sandburg's ultimate reputation as a poet is likely to rest … wrapped up to a degree with the facts of democracy.” One strictly “literary” periodical, Poetry, a Magazine of Verse, where Sandburg's “Chicago” first shouldered its presence onto the literary horizon, could scarcely have ignored the event and chose the high priest of the current rite of modern verse, William Carlos Williams, to perform the sacrificial slaughter of the sacred bull of the lyceum circuit who had two years before been maimed if not slaughtered by savage reviews of his oversize novel Remembrance Rock. Perhaps Sandburg had become too much of a national figure, fraternizing with a president and assorted senators, not to mention his favorite governor of Illinois, who had chosen him as inaugural laureate in 1948, thus setting a precedent for President Kennedy in choosing Sandburg's rival, Robert Frost, for a similar distinction in the nation's capital, a little more than a decade later.

It was inevitable for a poet like William Carlos Williams, who wrote always, as critics have pointed out, to test his own theory of poetry, and as a result more often produced a test than a poem, to conclude that Sandburg was no poet. Indeed, he was no theoretician of poetry. In Williams's view, “without a theory, as Pasteur once said, to unify it, a man's life becomes little more than an aimless series of random and repetitious gestures.”

They had once, years ago, been generally considered friendly rivals, Sandburg and Williams, as poets who had much in common, “in the American grain,” to borrow the title of Williams's most interesting book. But their principal unlikeness, as Williams saw it, was the knife with which he could carve up the failure whose popular fame had so outstripped his own. Williams's review showed some masterly insights into Sandburg's accomplishment, but an even greater insight into Williams's own accomplishment! Everything Sandburg did as a poet was used as a spotlight to bring out the theoretically better lineaments in the features of Williams's work. “It is up to us to discover (as he couldn't) what in that free verse may be picked up and carried forward. … It was a magnificent conception. He documented a thousand examples of that which the pinching poets with their neat images, take E. E. Cummings for instance in comparable passages, have merely brushed upon in passing.” But, Williams concluded, with a smart, if not quite as accidental a witticism as he pretended, “It is formless as a drift of desert sand engulfing the occasional shrub or tree and as formed. The Collected [sic] Poems make a dune-like mass; no matter where you dig into them it is sand. (Sandburg! I didn't think of that. It seems as if the name itself has gotten into it.)” Crap! How naive did Williams think Poetry's readers could be? Thus, as a critic, he had only metaphor at his command, even as Carl Van Doren and Conrad Aiken had had a quarter of a century earlier. All-in-all Williams's performance was one of his most scintillating, if unreliable, commentaries on literature.

In the midst of the depression, Ben Belitt, like most poet-critics of Sandburg, when reviewing The People, Yes, was disturbed by what he felt to be the surplus of propaganda and the scarcity of poetry. Quoting Sandburg's line addressed to the Chinese philosopher in the poem—“Was he preaching or writing poetry or talking through his hat?”—Belitt concluded that “Sandburg has devoted the greatest part of his energies to the first, considerably less to the second, and nothing at all to the last.” Such anticlimactic praise tells us chiefly that Belitt was writing for the Nation.

Sandburg's “preaching” frequently does not appeal even to the professor-critics who find his poetics to stand up under close analysis. Thus Professor Gay Allen complains in the South Atlantic Quarterly that Sandburg's “delicacy, and his painting by a few deft strokes, like the Chinese or Japanese artist,” as well as his “oblique approach and (paradoxically) deep etched implications,” which Allen believes to be the better aspects of his poetry, “are often obscured by his banjo-strumming and preaching.” It is clear that certain aspects of Sandburg's poetry repel certain readers. Some who apparently find no conflict between Eliot's preaching and poetry find Sandburg's preaching obnoxious. After all, word for word and line for line, Eliot's poetry contains a higher proportion of preaching than Sandburg's does. It is not preaching per se that turns the professors off, but what is preached. Of course, I do not agree that preaching and poetry are necessarily mutually exclusive in any case. Some of the best of Eliot, and of Sandburg, not to mention Shelley, Wordsworth, and practically every great poet, lies in the fine blend of their particular gospel and their way of getting it across, or trying to. They never succeed, of course, with readers predilected to dislike.

As his gospel does not appeal to some, his sentiments do not appeal to others. Professor Louis Rubin in reviewing The Complete Poems wrote sympathetically of Sandburg's poetics in the Hopkins Review, but complained, “What is bad in Sandburg is not his poetics, but his sentimentality. And when he is good, it is not because he sings of the common people, but because he has an extraordinarily fine gift of language and feeling for lyric imagery.” One may agree with Rubin's principle here but question its significance. Can it be denied that some of the best of Sandburg's “fine gift of language,” as of Lincoln's, was called into play by his love of common people? Common people inspired Sandburg to some of his best words, and I am afraid that some of his critics are influenced occasionally by their own contrary sentiments. The truth is that Sandburg liked so many disparate individuals that he sang of “the people” naturally, without the overtones of odd intimacy that Whitman injected into his poems to man en masse.

Now lest anyone suppose I think Sandburg perfect, there's no denying that he has his faults, particularly as historian and prose writer—“insufferable” said Edmund Wilson in Patriotic Gore. But it may be wondered, even as historian, by way of odious comparison, whether in a long career Sandburg ever effused so much insufferability as Wilson did in his self-indulgent The Cold War and the Income Tax: A Protest.

3

The looseness of Sandburg's diction, combined with the looseness of his rhythms, is alleged by nearly all his critics to defeat his effect as a poet, and his surplus of rhythm is often alleged to ruin his prose. He was not discriminating, as a poet must be. He is allegedly not Whitman's equal because he did not limit himself to Whitman's discipline (now recognized by every college professor) of “organic” rhythms, of the sea, of the breath, the incremental repetitions of the King James Bible, catalogs, or whatnot; or on the other hand, Whitman's, by comparison, rather timid experimentation with a new American poetic diction—the two aspects of Whitman which a critic can now asseverate was “the natural expression of the poet's sensibility.” And of course, Sandburg fails to accomplish what either Frost or Eliot did by sticking pretty much to the iambic line. Yet, as Oscar Cargill said in the English Journal, “With a guitar to strum and a sympathetic audience, Carl Sandburg could make Harry S. Truman's budget message sound, if not like ‘Lycidas,’ at least like Allen Tate's ‘Ode to the Confederate Dead.’” This comment recognizes one of the certain facts about Sandburg's poetry, if not Harry Truman's prose, which he made the most of as a troubadour. He was indisputably one of the two best platform poets among modern bards, because he and Frost had at least one thing in common: each had a perfect understanding of the peculiar rhythms, tonality, and color of his own poetry, and an uninhibited willingness to perform it before an audience.

Frost's rhythms are masterly within their limited scope, but Sandburg's rhythms reach far beyond the relative restrictions of Frost's, and his diction is far more various and adventurous, if not always profound, for the simple reason that his aesthetic practice controlled his theory, rather than the other way around. Frost's often repeated jest—that he'd as soon play tennis with the net down as write free verse—was taken less seriously by Frost than by some of his acolytes, for he would admit that if you did play without a net, it could be one helluva different game—if you could keep up to it! He thought Sandburg didn't, of course. And yet, there is a poetic imagery and a rumble in Sandburg to be found nowhere else.

In the subway plugs and drums,
In the slow hydraulic drills, in gumbo or gravel,
Under dynamo shafts in the webs of armature spiders,
They shadow-dance and laugh at the cost.

Two brief passages may illustrate the respective poet's respective art—an informal image in formal rhythms and a formal image in informal rhythms—each poetically to its purpose, making formal seem informal and informal seem formal, or vice versa, depending on whether one's eye or ear is the more sharply tuned. One suspects the critics have better eyes than ears when they find Frost more the poet in musical matters. Meter and rhythm—

Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun

Yes—but—

The woman named Tomorrow
sits with a hairpin in her teeth
and takes her time
and does her hair the way she wants it …

When the critics and professors come to appreciate Sandburg's aesthetic as well as Sandburg did, they too perhaps can interpret his poetry as effectively as he did. But they will have to do this for themselves before they can interpret for others. And they will have to escape the Prufrock syndrome before they can begin. For example, Randall Jarrell, whom Frost once dubbed “one of the most pronounced literary figures,” passed off Sandburg's poems as mere “improvisations.” Jarrell admitted that “it is marvelous to hear him say The People, Yes, but it is not marvelous to read it as a poem.” One wonders, did Jarrell really ever try? Ernest Hemingway once made a remark to the effect that critics frequently start with something that they never establish to be true and go on with the assumption that it is. Hemingway, incidentally, held a higher opinion of Sandburg's art than Jarrell did.

The reason why Eliot's inspired doggerel “The Hollow Men” has been ranked by the literary establishment of our era as a significant poem while Sandburg's “Caboose Thoughts” has been largely ignored will remain for future literary historians to analyze, but I hazard the guess that the outcome will have as much to say in the long run for the intrinsic poetry of Sandburg's rhythms, diction, metaphor, or what-have-you, as for Eliot's. If either of these poems has flourished by reason of an adventitious and forced feeding, in a hothouse intellectual climate, it is certainly not Sandburg's.

Sandburg never suffered, apparently, from the psychoemotional dyspesia which afflicts the likes of T. S. Eliot and Allen Tate and which has appealed so largely to the academics for purposes of classroom diagnosis and learned papers. It has been the Puritan heritage of all English departments to suffer a common misery with Eliot. The misery derives from adolescent discovery that Adam and Eve were probably no myth, but like the professor's own fathers and mothers, whom they represent psychologically, were the persons who got there long before them. They have been predilected to find Eliot's “reality” stimulating because it tickles their own sense of guilt and indulges them in the vicarious pleasures of psychodramatic self-immolations, where the witch-at-the-stake (or Christ-on-the-Cross?) is the poet's psyche, but the intellectual pleasure is the professor's, and by mishap also the student's, as he grows, espaliered in the proper tradition.

The pity of this tradition is that it eventuates in the Beckett-Burroughs nadir for “the best minds of our generation,” and not in Eliot's hoped-for but never achieved new version of Dante's paradise.

It is obvious that Sandburg is not “high church”; he is not even “church.” He is some kind of pagan mystic, without benefit, however, of deriving from the proper Hindu sources.

4

The fact that Sandburg is a mystic is perhaps best illustrated by his repeatedly avowed belief that everything will work out.

In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
                    the people march,
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps,
                    the people march:
                                                                                                              “Where to? What next?”

How contradictory and inconsistent can one be—a former socialist who not only came to celebrate rugged individualism in his own way but made his own fortune by doing his own thing, come hell or high water! And with a mystical conviction that simply smells of common people.

Even a sympathetic and perceptive critic like Daniel Hoffman is troubled by this contradiction, or rather by his feeling that Sandburg fails because he does not—and Hoffman cannot—reconcile the disparities. Emerson's and Whitman's rational but sympathetic critics had the same difficulty. Sandburg's practical mysticism may not be as profound as Emerson's or Lincoln's, but it is certainly as pervasively poetic as Whitman's. Hoffman and Morton Zabel, as well as others who do not sneer, although sympathetic and perceptive, are critically circumscribed by their perspective, which sees Sandburg as naturally “limited” by his “belief in common speech and popular democracy as the basis for art” to “one or another form of realism.” They believe he is merely attempting “to transcribe from nature,” as a sort of animated television camera. This is all the more strange from Hoffman, when he analyzes with telling effect the pattern of poetic organization which he as a poet detects in Sandburg's allegedly amorphous mass of detail. But aesthetic rightness is not enough, even for Hoffman. If it does not hang together theoretically and systematically, then it doesn't work as poetry for him any more than it does for William Carlos Williams.

This notion of Sandburg's realism began with “Chicago” and “Fog,” when it was conventional for commentators, critics, and professors, to call Sandburg a “realist,” with “imagistic” overtones. These were the two literary words of the day, by which the then “new” poetry was categorized and cataloged. That neither term fit Sandburg very well was obvious, but words must be found by critics to abstract the recalcitrance of both the fluid and the concrete.

In regard to Sandburg's realism, Allen Tate has recently said with some tartness that “Carl Sandburg, who had all sorts of ‘real’ jobs, got less reality into his poems than T. S. Eliot got into his.” Tate may be right, at least to the extent of his own understanding of reality, in that the reality which Eliot got into his poems was a reality that Tate knew at first hand, but in which Eliot was his master. This has been obvious for years to anyone who reads both Eliot and Tate with appreciation. But one can go further than this in agreeing with Tate, to say that Sandburg's reaction to his experience of reality was essentially, in a scientific age, where the animism of the primitive poet could not be primitively adopted, that of Emerson and Whitman, and before them that of primitive poets the world over. It is an undifferentiated outlook in which things no less than words are symbols and are both “real,” for purposes of art (magic), if not for science. It is this quality perhaps which prompted Mark Van Doren's comment that “he knows better than any of his contemporaries how to put a flowing world on paper.”

Even a consistent poet changes, and his milieu sometimes changes even more. Sandburg's good-humored response to Kenneth Rexroth's query—“Where is the Sandburg who talked of picket lines? Where is the Sandburg who sang of whores?”—as reported by Harry Golden, highlights the inability of his latter-day critics to keep their eyes on the ball: “I am eighty-five years old. I am not going to talk about whores at my age. As far as the union boys are concerned, they are playing the dog races in Miami.”

Of course, the professors have not entirely neglected Sandburg in recent years. Daniel G. Hoffman, Oscar Cargill, Mark Van Doren, Louis Rubin, and Gay Allen, among others, have written with perception and appreciation of what they like, and Richard Crowder has produced a critical biography of considerable merit in spite of its defensive tone. The net effect, however, seems to be that the knowledgeable student of literature must at least halfway apologize for believing Sandburg to be even a genuine poet, not to say a great poet. To an extent it is the case of Whitman and Twain all over again—that it takes some years of educating the educators to an aesthetic more ample than their tradition allows. But more than this—if I may be allowed my own metaphor for what is right with Sandburg's poetry—it is a question of appetite and taste for a prairie spring salad of succulent poke and dandelion leaves and a few green onions, seasoned with vinegar and bacon drippings, rather than the salad of sophisticated spinach, lettuce, and endive (ahndeev, if you please), delicately tossed in a properly unwashed bowl that preserves the aura, not merely of proper garlic, but generations of proper garlic, mildly rubbed. Does one have to recognize only one or the other of these as poetry?

Shake back your hair, O red-headed girl.
Let go your laughter and keep your two proud
          freckles on your chin.

or

A woman drew her long black hair out tight
And fiddled whisper music on those strings.

5

Instead of trying, in the theoretically determinate and differentiated tradition of Western art in general and poetry in particular, either the brand of William Carlos Williams or that of T. S. Eliot, to create, or re-create, a religiously, or (for Williams at least) theoretically, valid world of myth and symbol in the twentieth century, Sandburg reverted to the primary poetic task of trying to apprehend by naming. He would be particular in the things he chose and in the words he found to name them, but he would not be discriminating by anyone else's theory in his choice, and he would be thankful for his luck in finding. His aesthetic was Confucian: nothing is right, proper, or ordered theoretically, but everything lies in an aesthetic pattern of relationship which must be directly apprehended to be appreciated. It was also Emersonian. Remember “Beauty is its own excuse for being” and “Each and All.” Sandburg's “Tentative (First Model) Definitions of Poetry” and his “Notes for a Preface” to Complete Poems are his naming of his own indeterminate aesthetic, which permitted “the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits,” take it or leave it.

If the professors have decided for the present to “leave it,” one may suspect that it is barely possible another academic generation may decide to “take it.” After all, it has required the better part of a century for most professors to adopt Whitman as their own, and make of him not just a course but, in some places, a series of courses. It may well become as academically profitable to analyze Sandburg's free verse as it will be to analyze the prose poetry or poetic prose of Saint-John Perse, the only other major poet in our day who has leaned heavily on Whitman without imitating him. Among the literary ironies, not the least pyritic is that Perse received the Nobel Prize, but the distinguished Swedish-American poet did not—except at second hand by accolade of Hemingway. It is not inconceivable, I think, that Cornhuskers or The People, Yes will yet speak in the space age already upon us with more to say of reality than The Waste Land does. And it is more than just barely possible that even the poetic questions Sandburg asked in poem after poem are better than many poetic answers long outmoded, as in the first, and maybe the best, thing he ever wrote about Abraham Lincoln.

                                        In a Back Alley
Remembrance for a great man is this.
The newsies are pitching pennies.
And on the copper disk is the man's face.
Dead lover of boys, what do you ask for now?(1)

Sandburg's entire oeuvre is an elaboration on the theme of a letter he wrote to his bride-to-be from Two Rivers, Wisconsin, 23 April, 1908:

Back from a long hike again—sand and shore, night and stars and this restless inland sea—Plunging white horses in a forever recoiling Pickett's charge at Gettysburg—On the left a ridge of jaggedly outlined pines, their zigzag jutting up into a steel-grey sky—under me and ahead a long brown swath of sand—to the right the ever-repelled but incessantly charging white horses and beyond an expanse of dark—but over all, sweeping platoons of unguessable stars! Stars everywhere! Blinking, shy-hiding gleams—blazing, effulgent beacons—an infinite, travelling caravanserie—going somewhere! “Hail!” I called. “Hail—do you know? do you know? You veering cotillions of world's beyond this world—you marching, imperturbable splendors—you serene, everlasting spectators—where are we going? do you know?” And the answer came back, “No, we don't know and what's more, we don't care!” And I called, “You answer well. For you are time and space—you are tomb and cradle. Forever you renew your own origin, shatter to-day and re-shape to-morrow, in a perpetual poem of transformations, knowing no goal, expecting no climax, looking forward to no end, indulging in no conception of a finale, content to move in the eternal drama on which no curtain will be rung. You answer well. I salute you to-night. I will see you again and when I do again I will salute you for you are sincere. I believe you O stars! and I know you! We have met before and met many times. We will meet again and meet many times.”—All this time I was striding along at a fast pace, to the music of the merry-men. The merry-men, I forgot to explain, ride the white horses and it is the merry-men who give voice to the ecstasy and anger and varying humor of the sea. The tumultuous rhythms of the merry-men and a steady ozone-laden wind led me to walk fast and when I turned from the sea, there burst on my vision, the garish arc-lamps of the municipality of Two Rivers. So I turned to the sky and said, “Good-by, sweet stars! I have had a good companionship with you to-night but now I must leave star-land, and enter the corporation limits of Two Rivers town. Remember me, O stars! and remember Paula down in Princeton, Illinois! and if any agitators appear in star-land, let them agitate—it will be good for them and for all the little stars.” And as I plodded down a narrow street fast past the hovels of fishermen and the tenements of factory workers, I quoted from the bare-footed, immortal Athenian, “The gods are on high Olympus—let them stay there.” Yes, let the gods who are on high Olympus stay where they belong. And let us turn to the business of rearing on earth a race of gods.²

Thus to apprehend and to name is the essence of Sandburg, and it stays. Though written to Lilian Paula Steichen, it speaks to me. It says something I like to hear today just as I first liked to hear “Caboose Thoughts,” all too many years ago.

It's going to be all right—do you know?
The sun, the birds, the grass—they know.
They get along—and we'll get along.

Notes

1. From Chicago Poems by Carl Sandburg. Copyright 1916 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc. Copyright 1944 by Carl Sandburg. Reprinted by permission of Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc.

2. From The Letters of Carl Sandburg edited by Herbert Mitgang, 1968 by Lilian Steichen Sandburg, Trustee. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.