In this American melting-pot the English language becomes the mother tongue of the sons of Perse and Slav and Swede; and through that language, and the literature born in it, more and more as time goes on, must blow tropic and arctic airs, winds from East and West, perfumes of Araby and salt spray from the northern seas. No prophet can measure the ultimate enrichment of our art through this enrichment of our racial strain. Provincialism will hardly survive, and our democracy of precepts and precedents—an Anglo-Saxon inheritance, like our language, from the patterned and fenced-in past—will have to expand to the larger tests of cosmopolitanism and human brotherhood.

From certain of these newer Americans and their sons have come of late at once the harshest challenge and the most idealistic appreciation of this incomplete, but urgent and hopeful, democracy which they find here. Such voices as Sandburg the second-generation Swede, Giovannitti the Italian, Rosenfeld the Yiddish Jew, Ajan the Syrian, are uttering at once the challenge and the ideal with a passion rare among poets of the Anglo-Saxon stock. Of these latter at this moment only Edgar Lee Masters, and C. E. S. Wood of Oregon, occur to me as bent upon the same business—in the deepest sense a poet's business—of seeing our national life in the large—its beauty and glory, its baseness and shame.

Carl Sandburg has the unassailable and immovable earth-bound strength of a great granite rock which shows a weather-worn surface above the soil. Like such a rock, he has a tender and intimate love of all soft growing things—grasses, lichens, flowers, children, suffering human lives. One would no more question his sincerity than that of the wind and rain. His book, whether you like it or not, whether you call it poetry or not, is fundamental in the same majestic sense—it is a man speaking with his own voice, authoritatively like any other force of nature.

I remember the emotion with which I first read many of these poems—in type-written sheets sent to Poetry over two years ago by some friend of the poet. That first conviction of beauty and power returns to me as I read them again. This is speech torn out of the heart, because the loveliness of “yellow dust on a bumble-bee's wing,” of “worn wayfaring men,” of ships at night, of a fog coming “on little cat feet,”—the incommunicable loveliness of the earth, of life—is too keen to be borne; or because the pain of “the poor, patient and toiling,” of children behind mill-doors, of soldiers bleeding in the trenches—all the unnecessary human anguish—is too bitter for any human being, poet or not, to endure in silence.

Mr. Sandburg knows his Chicago, and the book as a whole gives us the city in a masterpiece of portraiture. The town—its streets and people, its parks and broad lake and the sand-dunes beyond—the whole half-formed metropolis—is painted in broad vital strokes and rich colors by the loving unflattering hand of an artist. Here are a few details:

“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.

“USED UP”

          Roses,
          Red roses,
          Crushed
In the rain and wind
Like mouths of women
Beaten by the fists of
Men using them.
O little roses
And broken leaves
And petal wisps:
You that so flung your crimson
To the sun
Only yesterday.

Mr. Sandburg's free-verse rhythms are as personal as his slow speech or his massive gait; always a reverent beating-out of his subject. They are rugged enough at times—as when he salutes Chicago, “stormy, husky, brawling,” and sets her high among cities, “with lifted head singing, so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.” In some of the war poems his rhythms pound like guns booming, and when he talks back to the loud-mouthed Billy Sunday the swing of a smashing prose hammer is good enough.

But again, under softer inspiration, this poet's touch becomes exquisitely delicate. Indeed, there is orchestral richness in his music; he plays divers instruments. Such lyrics as “The Great Hunt,” “Under,” “Beachy,” “At a Window,” “The Road and the End,” have a primal, fundamental beauty, a sound and swing as of tides or bending grain. Many of these Poetry has had the honor of printing, but this one is new:

“UNDER”

I am the undertow
Washing tides of power,
Battering the pillars
Under your things of high law.
I am a sleepless
Slowfaring eater,
Maker of rust and rot
In your bastioned fastenings,
Caissons deep.
I am the Law,
Older than you
And your builders proud.
I am deaf
In all days,
Whether you
Say “yes” or “no!”
I am the crumbler:
To-morrow.

The spirit of the book is heroic, both its joy and its sorrow. It says, “Keep away from the little deaths!”