[In the following review of Sandburg's first three major volumes of verse, Loeber argues against those critics who dismiss Sandburg's poetry as merely “tough” or “insensitive.”]

Snobbishness is so characteristically an imperishable human trait, it is high time it came to be listed among the virtues. Even so universal an appreciation as the appreciation of literature is touched and tainted by this dry-rot of the critical attitude.

Last week I read a paragraph by Dr. Felix E. Schelling, Phi Beta Kappa senator or whatever those elders are called, and luminary of the Department of English, University of Pennsylvania. His statement in substance was a tilt of the academic nose. He declared that Carl Sandburg need trouble no one especially; that Carl Sandburg represented the intellectual Tough, and that we could ignore him as we can ignore the Tough on the streets. “… he is just a man who sets out to find ugly things and to tell about them in an ugly way.”

Perhaps, Mr. Sandburg would thank me but little for being irritated by such dusting of sensitive hands; perhaps he would prefer that I forget Dr. Schelling and his dusting; perhaps Mr. Sandburg welcomes the name of Tough. I don't know. Better than that, I don't care. For the moment I am interested in that kind of snobbishness in more or less authoritative pedagogic circles which tilts a nose at any literary expression which does not very obviously carry on the tradition of dead and honored writers.

I suspect that Dr. Schelling spied the word “hog-butcher” and was shocked into a conviction which he could not change though he read every poem Carl Sandburg has ever written. We acquire our attitudes that way. Believing this, I reread Sandburg's three volumes, Chicago Poems, Cornhuskers, and Smoke and Steel. I assumed that Dr. Schelling was willing to dust Sandburg off his hands because of the words Sandburg used and not because of his ideas and imagery. Consequently, if a poem held words or combinations of words like “traffic cops,” “soup,” “shoe leather,” “Philadelphia,” “mister,” “coffee cups,” “summer shirt sale,” “scissors,” “cheap at the price,” words most pertinent to life but, to the professors, quite out of place in an emotional reflection of life, I checked off the poem as a tough-ugly poem.

The result was interesting. Out of the 441 poems in the three books, 199 were tough and 242 could not, I think, even by Dr. Schelling, be considered as tough. I tried to be careful. It frightened me, I was so careful. If a word suggested the least toughness, it threw out the entire poem. In Chicago Poems, I learned that only 45 out of 101 were tough; in Cornhuskers, 53 out of 103; in Smoke and Steel, 104 out of 192. Mr. Sandburg seems to be growing tougher with each book; but my research shows him still on the side of the academic angels.

The point of the matter is, I think, this: it would be absurd for Mr. Sandburg to adopt a set of words foreign to the life he is attempting to express. It is indicative of a rare sincerity that he courageously uses those very words which vitalize his images. And it is ridiculous for his admirers to apologize for him—and some of them do—because it is believed he sometimes writes under the influence of the “he-man” “eater-of-raw-meat” dramatization of his personality. I have the conviction that Mr. Sandburg writes just how it feels for him to be alive. As far as it is humanly possible, he uses those words which are for him the most expressive of his inspiration. And if his choice of words shocks the sensitive, it discloses not so much a lack in his ability to make poems as a limitation in the ability of the academically sensitive to read them.

Whatever the frock-coats think of the clothes Mr. Sandburg's poems wear, there is in the heart of each of them, as Sherwood Anderson has suggested in a recent Bookman, the “sensitive, naive, hesitating Carl Sandburg, a Sandburg that hears the voice of the wind over the roofs of houses at night, a Sandburg that wanders often alone through grim city streets on winter nights,” a Sandburg that knows and loves his people and their cities. It smacks of an alopogy for what the literary touch-me-nots name the “hairy Sandburg,” to mention the “sensitive Sandburg.” But I am not apologetic. (Opposing for a moment an attitude, I am forced to divide a poet up.) In all of Mr. Sandburg's poems, those which I like and those which I do not understand, I find the poet Sandburg—essentially the only Sandburg—gripped by indignation, sense of beauty, joy, grief. And that crystal quality of the penetrating poet-eyes, of the warm poet-heart, lifts him quite out of any torpid, heavy-shouldered, thick-necked Tough class, whether he hog-butchers or waves a lily, whether he jingles “loose change” or whispers.

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

He writes the following personal picture in “Chicago Poet.” (This poem was checked out as tough on a number of counts, notably “looking-glass,” “Hello,” “locks his elbow,” etc.)

I saluted a nobody.
I saw him in a looking-glass.
He smiled—so did I.
He crumbled the skin on his forehead frowning—so did I.
Everything I did he did.
I said, “Hello, I know you.”
And I was a liar to say so.
Ah, this looking-glass man.
Liar, fool, dreamer, play-actor,
Soldier, dusty drinker of dust—
Ah, he will go with me
Down the dark stairway
When nobody else is looking,
When everybody else is gone.
He locks his elbow in mine,
I lose all—but not him.

Unfortunately, you see, for the hand-duster, Carl Sandburg is human, like the rest of us, too human for academic exclusiveness to welcome as poet; especially since, even as poet, he must talk like the particular kind of human being he is—his language so deeply a part of him, he can not change it to suit the conventions of the class-room, and do it honestly. Best of all, if he can, he defiantly refuses to change it for special occasions, for special ears.

Consequently, it seems to me, he becomes a kind of precious thing to people; because he is able to talk for them and in the words of their mouths. When people go hunting for an expression of those dreams and hopes and beauties they are less articulate over than “home and mother” conventionalities—and it is only a minority who ever do—I have an idea they can come to know Sandburg better than any other of today's poets. If they try to meet him. Hand-dusters—and it is painful that so many of them are in a position to present their attitudes to the gullible with as much authority as impunity—insinuate that he is a Tough—a literary Tough, not altogether the proper sort to meet. There is something grossly humorous about it, and something bitter.

In a trolley car, this Tough can see

Faces
Tired of wishes
Empty of dreams.

Remembering his city and a night, this Tough can write “Lost”:

Desolate and lone
All night long on the lake
Where fog trails and mist creeps,
The whistle of a boat
Calls and cries unendingly,
Like some lost child
In tears and trouble
Hunting the harbor's breast
And the harbor's eyes.

“Choose,” this Tough can cry:

The single clenched fist lifted and ready,
Or the open asking hand held out and waiting.
                                        Choose:
For we meet by one or the other.

And not the very toughest is “Cool Tombs”; doubtless tough enough for Dr. Schelling. I am quoting it because it is the sort of poem that makes worrying over Sandburg's tough words mere pettiness. It burns unmistakably out of a highly developed and richly sensitive personality, as, I believe, all his poems do:

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 any get more than the lovers … in the dust … in the cool tombs.