The poetry of Carl Sandburg, the poet who loves the common folk, and who weaves into the meshes of his song the simple, homely things of life—the Kansas farmer with the corn-cob between his teeth, the red drip of the sunset, the cornhuskers with red bandannas knotted at their ruddy chins—cannot be shredded apart from Carl Sandburg, the man. Indeed, as I write I seem to be chatting with him about his work and about the moving things of life, the deep, rich things, of running waters, of companionship with birds and trees, of love and tenderness, of life among those who sweat and toil—those secret, hidden things which only those who are ambassadors to men can truly know and understand.

I see him leaning across the table in the little Italian restaurant, the most human, the most intensely alive man I have ever known. It is his face that is arresting—beautiful as the faces of strong men are beautiful, as Lincoln's is—a brooding face—gnarled and furrowed—cleft chin—a mouth that loops itself into smiles or that booms with deep laughter—“granite” eyes that glow—steel gray hair. Though strong and compelling, and though inevitably the conversation whips about him he has something of the artlessness of the child combined with that uncanny directness and simplicity which children possess.

As he talks you feel the touch of greatness upon this modest, lovable companion; you feel that he is one of those rare spirits who know back alleys, newsboys and farmhands, the crooning of the prairie, and the dust of the long road. You see him leaving school at thirteen to be buffeted by the prairie blizzards as he drives a milk wagon, toiling in brick-yards, swinging a pitch-fork in the husky gang of the threshing crew, shoveling coal, washing dishes, soldiering during the Spanish war, working his way through Knox College. These vignettes of his life quiver in your mind as he talks—and what an infinite range of subjects it is. “Poetry,” I hear him say, “is written out of tumults and paradoxes, terrible reckless struggles and glorious lazy loafing; out of blood, work and war and out of base-ball, babies and potato blossoms. For me there is a quality of poetry in: ‘Quiet as a wooden-legged man on a tin roof’ or ‘Busy as a one-armed paper-hanger with the hives.’ That glove working woman the Survey featured once, talked a speech as vivid as Irish or Chinese poetry at its best. Something like, ‘When I look out of the window at night the evergreens look like mittens.’ She put a fine, wonderful, vividness of gloves and mittens en masse oppressing her life. One felt humdrum choking a soul of art—and so—tragedy.”

There are flashes in his conversation that tell of the painstaking, persistent effort that has given him a mastery of his tools; the growth from the rondeau stage to the perfecting of a gesture of his own, the critical judgment which has led him to discard a mass of his work, publishing only a modicum of what he has composed, the quiet determination to give his own imaginative treatment to the life about him, the compressing of limber words into creative art during the odd snatches of a busy journalistic career.

All this is reflected in his two volumes of poems, Chicago Poems, and Cornhuskers (Henry Holt and Company), and in his magazine verse, for few persons present their slants at life so fully as does he in his work.

One would hardly suspect this lover of vagabonds and of children, this journalist who writes with a tang and a verve, whose industrial studies and articles on the Chicago race riots have won wide recognition, this delightful companion with his genuine touch of humor, this scoffer at those who strut and preen themselves, of being one of our great American poets. Louis Untermeyer, one of the outstanding critics of contemporary poetry, considers that he ranks with the three greatest poets in these states—the other two being Robert Frost and E. A. Robinson. It is this same Sandburg who in 1914 won the Levinson prize offered through Poetry, and who in 1918 shared with Margaret Widdemer the five-hundred dollar prize of the Poetry Society of America.

To those readers of the Survey who in English “Lit” have dissected poems with a forceps or measured them with a calipers, or who have been lulled by the tinkling of certain poets, much of Sandburg's verse may not seem to possess the divine afflatus. Such readers may be bound by the inhibitions of culture. But come with an open mind and a love of freshness and vigor and kindly treatment and you will find that his poems possess a moving rhythm, a rhythm that brawls and roars at times, and then that can be infinitely tender and exquisitely sweet. He does not shrink from using limber words, from using the idiom of the alley, the racy slang of the corn-field, or the argot of the steel-mill. They have the rhythm of life, with deep undertones, with delicate shadings, soft melodies that stir an inner sense of beauty, emotional connotations that express profoundly more than the nice use of words or their masterly groupings, rhythms that suggest intimations of subtle music, melodies that haunt like stirrings among the leaves on autumn nights. Some of the poems, it is true, have simply the rhythm of high voltage prose, and to many of these he has given prose form; some of these quiver and leap with the rush of words, as his tirade against Billy Sunday, called “To a Contemporary Bunkshooter,” which begins:

You come along—tearing your shirt—yelling about Jesus.
Where do you get that stuff?
What do you know about Jesus?

one of the most biting, caustic, ironic indictments in the English language. In contrast to such pieces as this, and “Chicago.”

Hog Butcher for the World,
Toolmaker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:

you have the fragile “Troths,”

Yellow dust on a bumble bee's wing,
Gray lights in a woman's eyes,
Red ruins in the changing sunset embers:
I take you and pile high the memories.
Death will break her claws on some I keep.

or the beautiful “Gone” which has been set to music by Rupert Hughes:

Everybody loved Chick Lorimer in our town.
                              Far off
                    Everybody loved her.
So we all love a wild girl keeping a hold
                    On a dream she wants.
Nobody knows now where Chick Lorimer went.
Nobody knows why she packed her trunk—a few old things
And is gone,
                              Gone with her little chin
                              Thrust ahead of her
                              And her soft hair blowing careless
                              From under a wide hat.
Dancer, singer, a laughing passionate lover.
Were there ten men or a hundred hunting Chick?
Were there five men or fifty with aching hearts?
          Everybody loved Chick Lorimer.
                              Nobody knows where she is gone.

Somewhere Whitman says: “But I am that which unseen comes and sings, sings, sings.” So, those who feel melody which “unseen comes, and sings, sings, sings” will turn with recurring frequency to Sandburg. They will discover that there are certain poems; such as “Loam,” “Gone,” “The Road and the End,” “The Answer,” “The Prairie,” “At a Window,” “Joy,” “Between Two Hills” and many others which will become part of the dear, remembered things, some of them touched with heartbreak or a mist of tears.

Though written in the so-called “new” forms these are handled with a masterly technique, particularly in the nice use of words, for it is evident that Sandburg loves words; he can caress them, make them rasp and burr, go on velvet feet, cry like the aching call of a bird to its storm-lost mate, or whisper like the flutter of hidden wings. But the words are only a part of the pattern. One might as well brush the dust from a white moth's wing or catch the elusive charm of a young girl's loveliness as separate the words from the poem, no matter if done with consummate skill.

It is, however, this poetry of the common-place, this abhorrence of book-language, this reliance on folk idiom, this picturing of the simple, homely things that interests us now. With it, and this is probably most significant to readers of the Survey, is the humanness and simplicity of Sandburg, his use of social material for so many of his themes, his infinite pity and tenderness, his stripping bare of social injustices, and his love of the common folk. Edith Wyatt in a letter expresses much of it in the apt phrase, “Indeed he is a species of nature student of city life.” Many of these poems, “Cripple,” “Anna Ihmroth,” “Population Drifts,” “Mill Doors,” “They Will Say,” although for me not among his most delicate, beautiful pieces, are the ones which most justify an account of him here.

Together with rhythm and a sympathy and understanding of life, is his ability to chisel a picture with a few bold, swift strokes, with a compactness and compression of language, with an intensity and singleness of vision, with an economy of words which gives a peculiar, at times startling effect to his images, an almost biblical brevity. In Smoke and Steel, just published (Harcourt), he says:

The wind never bothers—a bar of steel.
The wind picks only—pearl cobwebs—pools of moonshine.

After all, Sandburg's books are to be lived with, to finger over, to love as one does the faces of children or the caress of chubby fists, to go to when disillusionment threatens, to feel the great, throbbing, singing heart of America through all the inquisitions and repressions, to whiff the pungency of new-mown hay or the fragrance of the furrow turned by the plow, to catch the sweep of the prairie or the tang of the woods, or to see “the grey geese go five hundred miles and back with a wind under their wings.” A glimpse of the real Sandburg is a paragraph in his review of Ransome's book on Russia, written for the Chicago Daily News: “And then going on as though the human race is essentially decent and sweet and out of the trampling of this vintage of blood and tears, out of a brute earth of cold and hunger, we will yet come through clear-eyed with an understanding of what we want to make of the world we live in.”