I can begin this chapter on Carl Sandburg in no better way than by admitting the worst thing that most of his adverse critics charge against him—his brutality. And, without hastening to soften this admission, I would like to quote a short passage from a volume to which I have already referred. In Synge's preface to his Poems and Translations (published in 1911) he wrote, “In these days poetry is usually a flower of evil or good; but it is the timber that wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms. … Even if we grant that exalted poetry can be kept successful by itself, the strong things of life are needed in poetry also, to show that what is exalted or tender is not made by feeble blood. It may almost be said that before verse can be human again, it must learn to be brutal.”

John Masefield was the first in England to respond to this rousing prophecy and, with half a dozen racy narratives, he took a generation of readers out of the humid atmosphere of libraries and literary hot-houses. He took them out into the coarse sunlight and the rude air. He brought back to verse that blend of beauty and brutality which is poetry's most human and enduring quality. He rediscovered that rich and almost vulgar vividness that is the life-blood of Chaucer and Shakespeare, of Burns and Rabelais, of Horace and Heine and Villon, and all those who were not only great artists but great humanists. At a time when people were fumbling about, grasping tentatively at every banal or bizarre novelty in a search for strange things to thrill them, Masefield showed them that they themselves were stranger, wilder and far more thrilling than anything in the world or out of it. He brought a new glamor to poetry; or rather, he brought back the oldest glamor, the splendid illusion of a raw and vigorous reality.

And so Sandburg. With a more uncovered directness and even less fictional disguise, he goes straight to his theme. Turn to the first poem in the volume Chicago Poems (Henry Holt & Co., 1916) and observe this uplifted coarseness, this almost animal exultation that is none the less an exaltation.

“CHICAGO”

Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's
                    Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:
They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
                                        Bareheaded,
                                        Shoveling,
                                        Wrecking,
                                        Planning,
                                        Building, breaking, rebuilding;
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people,
                                                                                Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.

Here is a picture of a city and a man. It is brilliant, bold and, for all its loud vigor, visionary. Throughout the book, the poet is strangely like his city. There is the mixture of a gigantic, youthful personality and an older, alien will to mount. This blend of impulses shows even stronger in other sections of the volumes. In “Fogs and Fires” and the more definitely socialistic poems, we see Sandburg's inheritance of Swedish mysticism fused with an American, I might almost say a practical idealism; stubbornness turned to a storm of protest.

There is an affiliated side of Sandburg's power that most of his critics have overlooked, and that is his ability to make language live, to make the words on the printed page sing, dance, bleed, rage, and suffer with the aroused reader. This creative use of proper names and slang, the interlarding of cheapness and nobility which is Sandburg's highly personal idiom, would have given great joy to Whitman. That old barbarian was doubtless dreaming of possible followers when he said that the Leaves of Grass, with its crude vigor, was a sort of enlarged sketch-piece, “a passageway to something, rather than a thing in itself concluded,” a language experiment. In that unfinished sketch for a projected lecture (An American Primer) he seemed to be praying for future Sandburgs when he wrote:

“A perfect user of words uses things—they exude in power and beauty from him—miracles from his hands, miracles from his mouth—lilies, clouds, sunshine, women, poured copiously—things, whirled like chain-shot rocks, defiance, compulsion, houses, iron, locomotives, the oak, the pine, the keen eye, the hairy breast, the Texan ranger, the Boston truckman, the woman that arouses a man, the man that arouses a woman.

Words are magic … limber, lasting, fierce words. Do you suppose the liberties and the brawn of These States have to do only with delicate lady-words? with gloved gentleman-words?

What is the fitness—what the strange charm of aboriginal names?—Monongahela—it rolls with venison richness upon the palate.

American writers will show far more freedom in the use of names. Ten thousand common, idiomatic words are growing, or are today already grown, out of which vast numbers could be used by American writers, with meaning and effect—words that would be welcomed by the nation, being of the national blood.”

Turn now, while still on a consideration of words, raciness, and brutality in language, to what is to many the most offensive piece of writing in the volume. It is called “To a Contemporary Bunkshooter” and it begins:

You come along … tearing your shirt … yelling about Jesus.
                              Where do you get that stuff?
                              What do you know about Jesus?
Jesus had a way of talking soft and outside of a few bankers and higher-ups among the con men of Jerusalem everybody liked to have this Jesus around because he never made any fake passes and everything he said went and he helped the sick and gave the people hope.
You come along squirting words at us, shaking your fist and calling us all dam fools so fierce the froth slobbers over your lips … always blabbing we're all going to hell straight off and you know all about it.
I've read Jesus' words. I know what he said. You don't throw any scare into me. I've got your number. I know how much you know about Jesus.
He never came near clean people or dirty people but they felt cleaner because he came along. It was your crowd of bankers and business men and lawyers hired the sluggers and murderers who put Jesus out of the running.
I say the same bunch backing you nailed the nails into the hands of this Jesus of Nazareth. He had lined up against him the same crooks and strong-arm men now lined up with you paying your way.

Here we have an angry opponent of Billy Sunday answering that frothing evangelist in his own sweet mixture of slang, vilification and religious ecstasy. It is not only a tremendous protest at the falsification of Jesus but a passionate praise of the real martyr. And, incidentally, it is a startling experiment in the use of words. It seems almost a direct answer to Whitman's insistence that before the coming poets could become powerful, they would have to learn the use of hard and powerful words; the greatest artists are, he affirmed, always simple and direct, never merely “polite or obscure.” He loved violence in language. “The appetite of the people of These States, in talk, in popular speeches and writings, is for unhemmed latitude, coarseness, directness, live epithets, expletives, words of opprobrium, resistance.—This I understand because I have the taste myself as largely as any one. I have pleasure in the use, on fit occasion, of ‘traitor,’ ‘coward,’ ‘liar,’ ‘shyster,’ ‘skulk,’ ‘dough-face,’ ‘trickster,’ ‘backslider,’ ‘thief,’ ‘impotent,’ ‘lick-spittle.’”

There are, of course, times when, in the midst of rugged beauties, Sandburg exalts not beauty but mere ruggedness. He often becomes vociferous about “big stuff,” “red guts,” and the things which, on the printed page, are never strong but are only the stereotypes of strength. Sometimes he is so in love with the physical quality of Strength itself that one hears his adjectives creak in a straining effort to achieve it. See, for instance, such merely showy affairs as “Killers,” “Fight,” and one or two others. They put one in mind of a professional strong man in the glare of the footlights, of virility in front of a mirror, of an epithet exhibiting its muscle.

But, if any one imagines that Sandburg excels only in verse that is stentorian and heavy-fisted, let him turn to the page that immediately follows the title-poem. A greater contrast is inconceivable. This is the delicate and almost silent poem:

“SKETCH”

The shadows of the ships
Rock on the crest
In the low blue lustre
Of the tardy and the soft introlling tide.
A long brown bar at the dip of the sky
Puts an arm of sand in the span of salt.
The lucid and endless wrinkles
Draw in, lapse and withdraw.
Wavelets crumble and white spent bubbles
Wash on the floor of the beach.
     Rocking on the crest
     In the low blue lustre
     Are the shadows of the ships.

or, two pages further on, witness this:

“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.

Here we see what I think is Sandburg's finest artistic quality—the sharp and sympathetic gift of the etcher with his firm, clean-cut and always suggestive line. And the passion against injustice, against the economic horrors that stamp out beauty and kill even the hunger for it, cries equally through these more delicately-drawn pieces. Read, for utter poignance, “Graceland,” “Anna Imroth,” “Mill-Doors,” “Onion Days,” “Masses.” Or this even more wearied and pathetic poem:

“HALSTED STREET CAR”

Come, you cartoonists,
Hang on a strap with me here
At seven o'clock in the morning
On a Halsted street car.
Take your pencils
And draw these faces.
Try with your pencils for these crooked faces,
That pig-sticker in one corner—his mouth.
That overall factory girl—her loose cheeks.
     Find for your pencils
     A way to mark your memory
     Of tired empty faces.
     After their night's sleep,
     In the moist dawn
     And cool daybreak,
          Faces
     Tired of wishes,
     Empty of dreams.

Here again, as in “They Will Say,” “Fish Crier,” “Fog” and a dozen others, one sees how Sandburg evokes background and actors, a story or sorrow, with the fewest possible strokes and with a sympathy that none of our poets can surpass. His hate, a strengthening and challenging force, would distort and overbalance the effect of his work, were it not exceeded by the fiercer virility of his love. No writer in America is so hard and soft-speaking; beneath the brutality, he is possibly the tenderest of living poets. Read, as an instance, the poem on page 89:

“MURMURINGS IN A FIELD HOSPITAL”

[They picked him up in the grass where he had lain two days in the rain with a piece of shrapnel in his lungs.]
Come to me only with playthings now …
A picture of a singing woman with blue eyes
Standing at a fence of hollyhocks, poppies and sunflowers …
Or an old man I remember sitting with children telling stories
Of days that never happened anywhere in the world …
No more iron cold and real to handle,
Shaped for a drive straight ahead.
Bring me only beautiful useless things.
Only old home things touched at sunset in the quiet …
And at the window one day in summer
Yellow of the new crock of butter
Stood against the red of new climbing roses …
And the world was all playthings.

It is this delicate touch, this exquisite poignancy that makes Sandburg's harsher commentaries doubly important. His anger at conditions and his hate of cruelty proceed from an intense understanding of men's thwarted desires and dreams. This lavish but never sentimental pity shines out of all his work. It glows through poems like “Fellow Citizens,” “Population Drifts,” “The Harbor” and burns through the half-material, half-mystic “Choices,” “Limited” (a sadness edged with irony) and the unforgettable, stern pathos of

“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 Tomorrow.

Throughout the volume one is continually surprised to see so personal a twin picture; a double exposure, I might say, of a man and a city. In spite of a few affectations of idiom and twisted lines which lead up the same literary blind-alley that Ezra Pound has chosen as his habitat, Chicago Poems is a fresh proof of how our poetry has grown more vigorous and, at the same time, more visionary. It is made of rough timber; it has “strong roots in the clay and worms.”

In the new volume, Cornhuskers (Henry Holt & Co., 1918), there is the same animal and spiritual blend, the same uplifted vulgarity; but here it is far more coordinated and restrained. The gain in power is evident with the very first poem, a magnificent panoramic vision of the prairie that begins:

I was born on the prairie and the milk of its wheat, the red of its clover, the eyes of its women, gave me a song and a slogan.
Here the water went down, the icebergs slid with gravel, the gaps and the valleys hissed, and the black loam came, and the yellow sandy loam.
Here between the sheds of the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians, here now a morning star fixes a fire sign over the timber claims and cow pastures, the corn belt, the cattle ranches.
Here the gray greese go five hundred miles and back with a wind under their wings, honking the cry for a new home.
Here I know I will hanker after nothing so much as one more sunrise or a sky moon of fire doubled to a river moon of water.
The prairie sings to me in the forenoon and I know in the night I rest easy in the prairie arms, on the prairie heart!
     After the sunburn of the day
     handling a pitchfork at a hayrack,
     after the eggs and biscuit and coffee,
     the pearl-gray haystacks
     in the gloaming
     are cool prayers
     to the harvest hands.
In the city among the walls the overland passenger train is chocked and the pistons hiss and the wheels curse.
On the prairie the overland flits on phantom wheels and the sky and the soil between them muffle the pistons and cheer the wheels.
I am here when the cities are gone.
I am here before the cities come.
I nourished the lonely men on horses.
I will keep the laughing men who ride iron.
I am dust of men.

These are the sonorous, opening lines of the volume, a wider and more confident rhythm than Sandburg has yet attempted. The entire collection is similarly strengthened; there is a greater depth and dignity in the later poems, the accent is less vociferous, more vitalizing. Observe the unusual, athletic beauty of “Manitoba Childe Roland,” “Always the Mob,” “The Four Brothers” and this muscular

“PRAYERS OF STEEL”

Lay me on an anvil, O God.
Beat me and hammer me into a crowbar.
Let me pry loose old walls.
Let me lift and loosen old foundations.
Lay me on an anvil, O God.
Beat me and hammer me into a steel spike.
Drive me into the girders that hold a skyscraper together.
Take red-hot rivets and fasten me into the central girders.
Let me be the great nail holding a skyscraper through blue nights into white stars.

In this volume Sandburg again shows how responsive he is to the limber and idiomatic phrases that are the blood and bones of our speech. His language lives almost as fervidly as the life from which it is taken. Yet here his intensity is seldom raucous. What could be quieter and yet more positive than the calm irony in “Knucks,” the pioneer-celebrating “Leather Leggings,” the suggestive force in “Interior,” the solemn simplicity of “Grass,” the epigrammatic brevity of

“SOUTHERN PACIFIC”

Huntington sleeps in a house six feet long.
Huntington dreams of railroads he built and owned.
Huntington dreams of ten thousand men saying: Yes, sir.
Blithery sleeps in a house six feet long.
Blithery dreams of rails and ties he laid.
Blithery dreams of saying to Huntington: Yes, sir.
Huntington,
Blithery, sleep in houses six feet long.

Similarly notable are the modern rendering of the tablet writing of the fourth millennium B. C. in “Bilbea,” the faithful picture of a small town in “Band Concert,” the suggestive “Memoir of a Proud Boy,” the strange requiem note in

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

This fresh blend of proper names and slang, which would so have delighted Whitman, is Sandburg's most characteristic idiom and is used with excellent effect in Cornhuskers. And it is this mingling that enriches his heritage of mingled blood. Beneath the slang one is aware of the mystic. The poet has learned to give his penetrative patois a cosmic significance; he gives us Swedenborg in terms of State Street. This peculiar mysticism looks out of “Caboose Thoughts,” “Wilderness,” “Localities,” “Old Timers,” “Potato Blossom Songs and Jigs.” There is a more extended and musical spirituality here than was contained in the earlier volume; a quality that is no less dynamic but far more lyric. There have been few rhymed poems that blend sweetness and sonority more skilfully than some of the lyrics in the sections “Haunts” and “Persons Half Known.” Notice the subtle flow of “Laughing Corn,” the tympanic syllables in “Drumnotes,” and the almost feminine grace of this poem from the latter division, a tribute to a singer who died just as she had begun to sing:

“ADELAIDE CRAPSEY”

Among the bumble-bees in red-top hay, a freckled field of brown-eyed Susans dripping yellow leaves in July,
                                        I read your heart in a book.
And your mouth of blue pansy—I know somewhere I have seen it rain-shattered.
And I have seen a woman with her head flung between her naked knees, and her head held there listening to the sea, the great naked sea shouldering a load of salt.
And the blue pansy mouth sang to the sea:
                                        Mother of God, I'm so little a thing,
                                        Let me sing longer,
                                        Only a little longer.
And the sea shouldered its salt in long gray combers hauling new shapes on the beach sand.

And here is an example of a mood that Sandburg mirrors so skilfully, a cloudy loveliness reflected in the hazy outlines of the free-rhythmed, unrhymed lyric:

“RIVER ROADS”

Let the crows go by hawking their caw and caw.
They have been swimming in midnights of coal mines somewhere.
Let 'em hawk their caw and caw.
Let the woodpecker drum and drum on a hickory stump.
He has been swimming in red and blue pools somewhere hundreds of years
And the blue has gone to his wings and the red has gone to his head.
Let his red head drum and drum.
Let the dark pools hod the birds in a looking-glass.
And if the pool wishes, let it shiver to the blur of many wings, old swimmers from old places.
Let the redwing streak a line of vermilion on the green wood lines.
And the mist along the river fix its purple in lines of a woman's shawl on lazy shoulders.

Here, in the work of Sandburg, is another phase of the new and definitely American spirit in our poetry. Here, in spite of its moments of delicacy, is no trace of delicate languors, of passion extracted from songs or life that is gleaned in a library. This is something carved out of earth, showing the dirt and the yellow clay; there are great gaps and boulders here, steaming ditches and the deep-chested laughter of workers quarreling, forgetting, building. As of Leaves of Grass, it can be said that he “who touches this book touches a man”—and there is nothing arts-and-crafty about him. Brutal, tender, full of anger and pity, his lines run light as a child's pleasure or stumble along with the heavy grace of a hunky; common as sunlight or talk on Third Avenue of a Saturday. Rough-hewn and stolid; perhaps a bit too conscious of its biceps; too proud of the way its thumping feet trample down quiet places. But going on, on … gladly, doggedly; with a kind of large and casual ecstasy. One thinks of a dark sea with its tides tossing and shouting. Or the streets of a crowd-filled city when a great wind runs through them.