In 1914 critical readers (as well as uncritical) found in Sandburg some disturbing departures from the poems they were accustomed to enjoy. Stephen Crane, it is true, had experimented, but he was dead. That eternal sophomore, Richard Hovey, had written innocuously of wanderers, lovers, and comrades, but he too was dead. James Whitcomb Riley had long before run out of steam with a few stilted sonnets commemorating his departed friends, and he too would be dead in two years. Lizette Woodworth Reese, Louise Imogen Guiney, Edith Matilda Thomas, Anna Hempstead Branch, Josephine Preston Peabody—all these three-named ladies and more like them had been providing devourers of verse with their fare: moods of gentility, second-hand emotions, sterile and hackneyed line structure and stanzaic patterns. Like the snows of yesteryear, where are they now? An exception was E. A. Robinson, a stickler for classic rhyme, rhythm, and stanza. He was an original with several published volumes which nobody was reading much except Teddy Roosevelt, for, in spite of their conventional appearance, they were out of the accepted rut. Robert Frost had needed to go to England to find a publisher and was only now beginning to be mentioned in his home country, and possibly for the wrong reasons.

Small wonder that readers were shocked by the raucous “Chicago” and were puzzled by the typographical arrangements of “Lost” and “Jan Kubelik.” These were in a cluster of poems in the opening pages of Harriet Monroe's Poetry: A Magazine of Verse for March, 1914. Two years later they were in Sandburg's first book (not counting the earlier privately printed works). The contents of Chicago Poems were distasteful, puzzling, invigorating—depending on what critic's comments one read. The reviewers were being called on to suspend reliance on the iambics and trochees of Richard Watson Gilder, the expected enclosing rhymes of John Banister Tabb, the neat structures of Madison Cawein, the philosophic abstractions of George Santayana, the unsurprising subject matter of Robert Underwood Johnson.

When young poets started reading this new collection, what did they find? For one thing, there was a free verse modified from the poet's beloved Walt Whitman. More often than not, Sandburg's lines were shorter than his mentor's, and his unity was generally achieved not in the line itself (for he often divided clauses in the middle or even into thirds and fourths), but through frequent rhetorical repetitions—sometimes exact, sometimes with increments—and through modestly climactic conclusions. Younger readers also found in Sandburg's poetry the Populist point of view—the idea that the people are the central resource in the American experience. Other poets too found that this new man was free in his use of the idiom of the streets and factories—words and phrases uttered by what he called “the mob,” in the purlieus of the city. They found unabashed expression of anger, of pride in strength, of tender compassion, but not the pointed ironies or the bookishness of William Vaughn Moody. Edgar Lee Masters and Vachel Lindsay may have been leading the way, but Sandburg was actually to take up the part of the American bard, to break completely away from the genteel tradition.

Meanwhile, ever since those first pieces in Poetry, Ezra Pound and Sandburg had been exchanging poems and compliments. Pound said he liked the way Sandburg had kept “down to brass tacks,” though he missed the restraint that rhyme would have given the verses; he said, typically, that another urban poet was superior in this regard—the fifteenth-century French chronicler of the seamy side of Paris, Francois Villon. Pound also criticized the use of gutter language, which he said was often the easiest way out of a problem of communication and not always the best. In turn, Sandburg testified that Pound had “done most of living men to incite new impulses in poetry.” Yet, when Pound tried to induce Sandburg to join the new movement of Imagism, Sandburg expressed preference for going his own unaligned way.

The next year following the publication of his book, it appeared certain that Wilson was not going to keep America out of war. In order to demonstrate their basic loyalty to American ideology, Carl and his wife Paula left the Social-Democrat ranks in which they had served for years. To avoid any hint of association with the Bolshevik point of view, they declared themselves Independents, though their daughter Helga assures us they were in truth Democrats.¹ The change in part was parallel with the poet's gradual turning away from what Amy Lowell said had been too much propaganda in his writing. Always there would be traces of his Populist provenience. From this time on, however, beginning with Cornhuskers in 1918, there was a noticeable shift from efforts deliberately to change the face of the country. More and more, Sandburg was showing acceptance of what he found.

Was he a loner at the beginning of his career? He may have been an innovator in the matter of poetry, but think of Dreiser's Carrie Meeber, who, like some of Sandburg's young women, leaves the prairies for the city. Her portrait could be an extension of the poet's vignettes of the adventurous girl in “Red-Headed Restaurant Cashier,” a restless Chick Lorimer in “Gone,” a bored “Mamie” up from a dull Hoosier hamlet and finding no more in life in a Chicago bargain basement.² Think of Frank Norris's Sam Lewiston, who is ripped off by the wheeler-dealers of the grain market. How like a Sandburg character he is, but without hope. Sandburg in all fairness must be read in quantities if the reader is to see that he goes beyond Dreiser and Norris in ultimate trust even in the face of adversity. The point here is, however, that Sandburg was not alone in making the common people the center of his interest. It is another point that he showed them to be a complex of pride, bravery, stoicism, humor, hard work, and eternal expectation.

Chicago Poems gained some converts. So did Corn-Huskers, and two years after that so did Smoke and Steel, which appeared in October, 1920. Earlier that year, in January, Sandburg had made a platform appearance at Cornell College, Iowa, the first of many, many college performances during the next forty years. His public readings, which conveyed his warm personal traits, helped a great deal to enhance his popularity and to sell his books, just as James Whitcomb Riley's road trips had done for him in the preceding generation. Again after another two-year interval, Sandburg published his fourth book of poems, Slabs of the Sunburnt West. It was now 1922, a mountainous year in the history of American and British literature. Most important for my focus, it saw Eliot's The Waste Land published in both England and the United States.

Here let me indulge in a quotation from something I wrote years ago: “Sandburg's techniques were the same as they had been in 1914. He was no longer a revolutionist in prosody and language, for his revolt had now become habit and had lost its novelty. Sandburg had in his beginnings elbowed out John G. Neihardt, George Sterling, and Madison Cawein. Now he was giving way to a new generation; he belonged to the status quo and was himself an old boy. It is significant that Malcolm Cowley's review of Slabs of the Sunburnt West appeared in the same issue of The Dial as the first momentous publication of The Waste Land. The tide had turned.”³ I wrote that in the early 1960's; now in 1978 we can say that temporarily the tide had turned.

Sandburg had succeeded as no other poet had in the first quarter of this century in loosening the poem's structure, making it more flexible: in freeing the line endings of the restriction of rhyme, in broadening the scope of the language to include words and rhythms of the streets and factories, in speaking out as one of the people both from his own view and in the voices of others with whom he was sympathetic, in vivid description of urban detail as well as rural, of broad landscape as well as intimate garden. But we must admit that Sandburg's first burgeoning as poet was indeed over. His poetic influence would not be felt again for another twenty years or more.

Though the elitist Dial had published the Eliot poem gladly and had admitted Cowley's comments on Slabs of the Sunburnt West, it had with right good will in general given short shrift to the writings of Sandburg. Oddly, the work of the two poets had certain similarities, but critics did not acknowledge them. The first poem in Sandburg's book was “The Windy City,” obviously using Chicago as its scene, just as The Waste Land was also urban, centered in the exile's London. The poets had developed their themes in works of similar length: The Waste Land is 434 lines long and “The Windy City” only 70 lines shorter. Line lengths are irregular in both poems, even though Eliot resorts to rhyme whereas Sandburg's verse is totally free. Both poems use a river bridge as an image central to the theme—an idea I will discuss shortly.

These may appear to be superficial likenesses. The differences between the two works are more profound. They reflect the attitudes of personalities poles apart. The Waste Land is freighted with irony. It pictures a fragmented world broken up by a sense of futility and an alienation of men from each other and from the power, beauty, and fulfillment of past civilizations. It reflects the fashionable attitudes among sophisticates toward contemporary social reality. Its thought is cosmopolitan, derived from the cultures of western Europe, from Homer to Baudelaire.

On the other hand, in “The Windy City” Sandburg's tone is inclined toward the matter of fact, toward acceptance. His world is built on the solidarity of the laboring classes. Most of his people, while independent, have a sense of belonging together. Whereas Eliot's view envelops a pointlessness, a lost spiritual community, Sandburg's attitude leans toward hope. His thought comes chiefly from his long-time Social-Democratic connection, from the publications of the Populists, from the folk wisdom of his subjects, and from his reading of Whitman and Emily Dickinson (with a nod to Stephen Crane). He does not condescend to the “people”: he accepts them and enters into their life as participant-observer.

Eliot's technique, then, is formed out of reference to his favorite authors of the past, near and far. He echoes and quotes them in passages placed next to slang, scraps of words from popular music, parody, and scenes from London life, both working-class and aristocratic. His is a complex of culture and style, but always a blend of theme and meaning in delivering fundamental, profound commentary on the state of today's world as it appears to him.

Sandburg's technique, also juxtaposing contrasting manners of speech, draws on the common man's vocabulary with more sympathy, more daily familiarity than does Eliot. A good exercise here would be to contrast the monologue in the pub about Lou and Albert in part II of The Waste Land with the breezy dialogue overheard in part 3 of “The Windy City.” One sees, here, how Sandburg's lines are shaped by the common man's aphorism as well as his humor and pathos, born of experience which Sandburg had shared from childhood. If he is not so consciously literary in his imagery and suggestion, he nevertheless makes his earthy commentaries neighbor to the gossamer and somewhat mystical fabric of moonlight and leafy trees, a practice he claimed again and again was central to all poetry. In the opening pages of Good Morning, America (1929) his thirty-sixth definition of poetry calls it “the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.” Likewise, in 1963 he published a last book of poems before his death, which he called Honey and Salt. His lyrics (hyacinths, honey) are as important to us as his realistic pictures (biscuits, salt).

To underscore further the differences in attitude between Eliot and Sandburg in 1922, let us examine specific passages. About half way through part III of The Waste Land, “The Fire Sermon,” is tucked a brief section describing the camaraderie of some Thames workmen:

O City city, I can sometimes hear
Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,
The Pleasant whining of a mandoline
And a clatter and a chatter from within
Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls
Of Magnus Martyr hold
Inexplicable splendor of Ionian white and gold.(4)

In Eliot's view the nearness of the hustle and bustle of a midday rendezvous for laborers and the gorgeous glories of a Christopher Wren church only emphasize the marvels of civilizations past and the vulgarity of life present. For Eliot the fellowship of these men only draws attention to the alienation from society of a man of cultivated tastes.

It is just such a situation that Sandburg would reverse. For him, he says in more than one place, “The past is a bucket of ashes.” His interest is in the vitality, the common purpose, the optimism of the fishmen. The man in his poem “Fish Crier” (p. 9) “dangles herring before prospective customers evincing a joy identical with that of Pavlowa dancing.” For Sandburg there is no separation from life; there is only the likeness of emotions of fish dealer and prima ballerina assoluta. Instead of hearing in passing the jollities of a pub at noontime, Sandburg joins his own kind, “the little Family of Man hugging the little ball of Earth” (p. 471). In the poem “Neighbors” (p. 169) Sandburg hears not just a general “clatter and a chatter” from the ““Greek coffee house” he observes. Instead,

                                                                                                    … men at tables
Spill Peloponnesian syllables
And speak of shovels for street work
And the new embankments of the Erie Railroad
At Painted Post, Horse's Head, Salamanca.

He hears not just a noise but the actual words they are saying, the sense they are making about their daily living, what Wallace Stevens frequently called the “quotidian.” Sandburg is not an outsider: he hears and appreciates the intimate details of the workmen's conversation; it is not just raucous racket for him, but the communication of his neighbors, the very stuff of life, of survival, of fruitfulness. In contrast, if Eliot had “neighbors,” they were historical literary figures like Juliana of Norwich, George Herbert, Lancelot Andrewes, and John Donne.

To return to the differences between The Waste Land and “The Windy City,” let us examine bridge and water in each poem as setting and as metaphor. In the Eliot work, London Bridge is overflowing with citizens and world-wanderers, mostly spiritually dead and unconcerned with the life around them. (“London Bridge is falling down,” the poet reminds us.) In “The Windy City” the Michigan Avenue Bridge, too, accommodates great crowds of people, but they are communicating with each other, if not through ideas born of theoretical and philosophical meditation, yet through folk wisdom and street slang. They are interested in each other on a familiar, daily basis. Whereas the Londoners only look down at their feet, the Chicagoans look at each other. If Eliot's bridge is falling down, Sandburg's bridge, with the alertness of a jackknife, opens to let the boats of thriving commerce through and then closes to allow the crowds to flow again, alive, aware.

Near London Bridge is King William Street, where the clock of the church of St. Mary Woolnoth announces the time, but is most binding for the listener when it is mysteriously silent on the stroke of nine. This is one of Eliot's gnomic references: it suggests complexly the hour of Christ's death and, in converse, the ninth month of the fertility process. At the north end of the Chicago bridge is the clock in the tower of the Wrigley Building, a structure openly related to business and a vigorous, on-going life, in contrast with St. Mary Woolnoth, a church structure which attracts very few worshippers, because faith and morality are falling apart. Once in a while, on the other hand, a passing Chicagoan admits that the imagination, planning, and execution that went into the building of the Wrigley skyscraper is at least worth remarking. In Eliot's London scene, night is just that—despair, separation, despair. At night in Chicago, however, the “lights” and “dots” of the bridges make a “gray and yellow” show—an entertainment, a diversion, a lively performance for a lively crowd of onlookers. Sandburg is accepting what he has found.

Because of the literary modes and the philosophic moods of the 1920's, then, the Eliot poem became the prototype. Its tone was despair, its subject was loss of impulse toward the refinement of life, its method was highly referential, placing classical and Elizabethan poetry next to contemporary street argot and jazz rhythms in, I must say, a condescending way. The mood of the poets, the writers of fiction, and the critics in general was toward the esoteric, the tragic view, and, in a plain word, the “difficult.” Sandburg, of course, had his readers and his audiences, but, with few exceptions, in the main these were the people of his audiences, members of what he called the “Family of Man,” “the Mob,” Whitman's “en masse.” They did not read Hart Crane, Archibald MacLeish, Marianne Moore, or Wallace Stevens as did the younger practicing poets.

After World War I the writers and the academics of Sandburg's poetic prime were inclined to be of closed minds about Sandburg's achievement. Some of them had left America for the cultural thicknesses of Europe, as Eliot and Pound had done earlier, though possibly not enough emphasis has been placed on the fact that, except for occasional visits, the poets in the main did not follow Pound and Eliot. Frost stayed in New England; William Carlos Williams was in Rutherford; Wallace Stevens was in Hartford; Marianne Moore was in Brooklyn; Robinson Jeffers was in Carmel; and so on. Sandburg had gone abroad on a newspaper assignment, but he stayed firmly rooted in the States, studying and writing on American subjects, developing themes based soundly on the American dream. The 1920's and even the '30's of F. D. R., however, seemed to be no time for Sandburg's poetry among critics and fellow writers. They apparently wanted to luxuriate in self-pity and despair and thought they needed their version of the tragic outlook.

Sandburg's people, let it be said, can suffer, but the suffering is not an Eliotic “ai, ai!” It is experience in a life cycle, to be borne and transcended, to be used as a stepping stone, an upward-bound ladder rung. Let us hear Sandburg himself in The People, Yes in 1936:

The learning and blundering people will live on.
                    They will be tricked and sold and again sold
And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds,
                    The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback,
You can't laugh off their capacity to take it.
.....          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?”

(pp. 615-17)

This is the conclusion of the poem. It is that “shovel of stars” in the sky that keeps them going. Contrast the people on London Bridge in The Waste Land, where “each man fixed his eyes before his feet”—“each man,” alienated, mind you, not “the people”; “his eyes before his feet,” not lifted up to “a shovel of stars for keeps.”

Like the poets, not all novelists followed Hemingway and Fitzgerald to the despair of post-war Europe. James T. Farrell, John Steinbeck, William Saroyan, for example, were attached to their native soil. Farrell's Chicago is Sandburg's Chicago in many ways; Steinbeck's pilgrims and California little people are the poet's “common man”; Saroyan's ethnics are his ethnics, though more gushing. Like the French Impressionist painters at the turn of the century (recall Renoir), these writers preferred the material of everyday life, the non-epic, the unimportant. Theirs were the scenes and voices of Sandburg's poems too. Nearly always, when he wrote of headline makers, of “big shots,” he wrote as a debunker or as a satirist. He was related in this attitude to such muckrakers as Lincoln Steffens and Ida M. Tarbell, who in the first decade of the century had pictured Philadelphia and the Standard Oil Company no better than they deserved. Sandburg's explosion in the face of Billy Sunday was in the same vein. His straight-faced comment in “Limited” actually was satirizing the middle-class smoking-car traveler whose only goal was Omaha.

In the other arts American subjects and motifs also interested the craftsmen of the period. Many composers worked with American ideas that were reflected in their rhythms, melodies, and moods, though, like Sandburg, they were often of a new kind in exploring and expressing their own harmonies. A list of Charles Ives's orchestral works in the decade of the Steffens and Tarbell exposés reads like a chauvinist's catalogue (Anti-Abolitionist Riots, Some Southpaw Pitching). George Gershwin remained exuberantly American to the end. Aaron Copland invented the music for the ballets Billy the Kid and Rodeo. In 1944, the year Sandburg began work on his novel, Remembrance Rock, Copland produced the lovely Appalachian Spring and a composition Sandburg surely would have applauded—Fanfare for the Common Man. The poet, then, was not left standing alone by the composers of the music as he explored American themes, scenes, and people in his own pioneering idiom.

Likewise, painters and graphic artists were absorbed by the same Americana that fascinated Sandburg and gave him inspiration, theme, and subject matter. Thomas Eakins drew from two sides of his personality to paint the athletic John Biglen in a Single Shell (Yale) and the aesthetic The Cello Player (Pennsylvania Academy). We are here reminded of, on the one hand, Sandburg's muscular poems “A Tall Man” (pp. 42-43) and “Plowboy” (p. 68) and, on the other, of the fine long lines of “Kreisler” (p. 125) and “Jan Kubelik” (p. 33): “Your bow swept over a string, and a long low note quivered to the air.” George Luks's The Spielers (Phillips Andover) is a joyous picture of two little girls dancing, daughters of laborers. They could just have stepped off Sandburg's “Picnic Boat” (p. 10) still responding to the Polish brasses sounding out “a folk-song for the home-comers.” The row of houses in winter snow in Charles Burchfield's Six O'clock (Syracuse) parallels the “six hundred porches” the milkman visits in Sandburg's “Psalm of Those Who Go Forth before Daylight” (p. 116). Reginald Marsh's Why Not Use the L? (Whitney, New York) could be the scene of Sandburg's “Poems Done on a Late Night Car” (pp. 61-62). George Bellows' Dempsey and Firpo (Whitney) has all the strength and motion of Sandburg's “The Shovel Man” (p. 9). There are more, but these show that, in spite of Eliot's ascendancy, Sandburg was not a loner in his American creativity.

Parenthetically, in 1976 I published an article on “Sandburg's Chromatic Vision in Honey and Salt,” which might have been subtitled “The Poet's Painterly Eye,” for I focussed attention on the vivid colors in the 1963 volume.⁵ My conclusion was that because of his unrestrictive use of tints and shades and primary colors he had, unlike most of his contemporaries in their old age, retained a youthful verve and awareness not only in his view of the externals of nature but in his observance of life as a whole. Whereas poets like Stevens, Frost, and Eliot had turned to blacks and grays or to actual colorlessness in many instances, Sandburg had still pictured his world in reds, blues, pinks, yellows, as well as steels, bronzes, and grays—a riotously kaleidoscopic experience. The result was not altogether unlike a pointilliste painting. All the separate spots of color had to be absorbed by the reader to understand ultimately the unities of the poet's world. In technique, then, as well as in theme and subject matter he was neighbor to the artist.

Sandburg has been accused of lacking depth, of giving us nothing but noncontinuous, immediate images with no past or future. (“The past is a bucket of ashes” needs to be examined in the context of the complete poems.) His unity, however, is of a remarkable sort, born of his unchanging emotional center. If one must read many poems to conceive the whole range of color, so he must read many poems to recognize the single-mindedness running throughout. If the later poems are less pounding in propaganda, there is no slack in underlying anger at injustice and hypocrisy, in compassion for the ordinary person and the underprivileged, and in loving acceptance of natural and man-made objects. He maintains his controlled ecstasy rising from his absorption in the colors and moods of nature, and he shows constantly his love for family, friends, and humanity—especially the American masses, who had almost totally engaged his concentration during the early years of this century. We say it again: the cataloguing of details does, after all, add up to a total and steadily glowing image, the expression of the sturdy emotional experience of a very sane man, gifted with resourceful insight.

There are critics who say that no one has yet stepped into the role that Whitman outlined for the future poet of his America. It seems to me, however, that, the more I read Sandburg, the more he appears to have come close to filling the bill as Whitman's truly American poet whose country has absorbed “him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.” There have been other roads to follow than the one Sandburg chose, but he has succeeded in giving shape on the page and permanence through his books to the words, the rhythmic phrases, and the received symbols of everyday American life. Often with notable subtlety he has given memorable expression to the ideals of the American masses, his beloved “mob.” As Frost has encouraged us to achieve moral insight and maturity through a Republican individualism in appreciating nature ourselves with sharpened sensitivity, so through Sandburg's eyes we see the Democratic point of view, our moral responsibility for society—both individuals nearby and crowds afar—enriched by a cherishing of the shapes, sounds, and colors in the natural world in which that society pursues its upward march. Sandburg's poems embrace all of life in a way Frost's do not attempt, through street slang, bluster, populist support, love poems, nature lyrics, city descriptions, and outbursts against hypocrisy. The scenes of America remain throughout all the books—city, the farm, the lakes and rivers, the mountains, the sea—and the people remain, the common people, the family, the friends, both modest and distinguished. And always the themes are there: love of humanity and of nature, the need for sympathetic understanding, the indignation at evil and deceit.

Almost alone of the well-known scholars who wrote reviews twenty-seven years ago of the first edition of Complete Poems, Louis Rubin was thorough and sympathetic, bringing balance and justice to earlier reviewers' opinionated myths.⁶ Recently, in commenting on Breathing Tokens, the 1978 book of Sandburg poems edited by the poet's daughter Margaret, Rubin says that Sandburg will be remembered for his first book, Chicago Poems, and for several dozen additional lyrics.⁷ He sees Sandburg's reputation as high for his poetry up to 1926, making a strong contribution to the break-up of the legacy of the mauve decade. Then public attention was turned to his Lincoln biography and his skill as platform performer. In fact, his next major book of poetry, The People, Yes (1936), did not come out for ten years, by which time it was obvious that he had taken a different road from the Imagists, whom Pound had futilely urged him to join in 1914. He had written over the years many small impressionist poems, but his techniques and subject matters had ranged far beyond the limitations imposed by the little band of poets first under the guidance of Pound and then of Amy Lowell. Rubin calls attention to the attitudes expressed in current college anthologies, that Sandburg's poems may be unpolished and lacking in intensity, but they make vigorous and immediate response, especially to the experience of the city. Rubin says that there is more to Sandburg's poems and that the truth will come out eventually, because not only did Sandburg use our vernacular with skill and sophistication, but his poems are indeed unique and sometimes spectacularly beautiful.

Eliot, Pound, and the New Critics were powerful influences to the end of World War II. It was modish to be difficult and existential and especially aware of subtleties of meter and rhyme, to be corralled in the kennel of European culture. Then the war was over and a new breed appeared. True, fine poets like Richard Wilbur continued to be loyal to their heritage; Robert Lowell and Theodore Roethke emerged. But others found nourishment in another direction. Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti were among the foremost spokesmen for a new freedom, back to Emerson—at least to his dictum if not to his praxis—with Emerson, Whitman, and then Sandburg as its pioneers. Even when not acknowledging Sandburg, poets began to feel that Sandburg-like liberation was perhaps closer to the American temperament of the time than Eliot and Pound, than Brooks and Warren would ever be. Ginsberg was shocking with his four-letter words and his explicit evocations, but he was in the long run honest and forthright. He was a founder of that seemingly footloose movement, the Beat Generation, marked by a freedom and mobility that Sandburg might have identified with. Listen to the first two lines of Ginsberg's “Howl”:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed
by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix. …(8)

The lines are generally longer than Sandburg's, more like Whitman's in their self-containment. But the Sandburg release has returned: freedom of diction, of subject matter, from linear restriction. Karl Shapiro in a recent review finds little distance between Sandburg and Ginsberg: says he, “both are political dreamers, idealists, impractical, joyous and outraged by turns, full of high seriousness and just plain bull.”⁹

A different quotation from Ginsberg will show another side. “In Back of the Real” is an effort on the poet's part to see through ordinary ugliness to spiritual loveliness. These are the closing lines:

Yellow, yellow flower, and
          flower of industry,
tough spikey ugly flower,
          flower nonetheless,
with the form of the great yellow
          Rose in your brain!
This is the flower of the World.(10)

Does this not recall the Sandburg of “Nocturne in a Deserted Brickyard,” “Moonlight and Maggots,” and “Lumber Yard Pools at Sunset”?

Without specific data it is difficult to assess the influence of an older poet on a new generation. I am going to quote from an early Sandburg poem and from a late one, and then follow that with excerpts from other poets born after the publication of The Waste Land to show they are not far from the Sandburg vein in many ways. The first lines are from the close of “Old Woman” (p. 69), Chicago realism in the customary unrhymed verses of irregular length, the last line a climactic single word of two syllables. The observer is on the last streetcar of the night schedule.

The headlight finds the way
And life is gone from the wet and the welter—
Only an old woman, bloated, disheveled and bleared
Far-wandered waif of other days,
Huddles for sleep in a doorway,
Homeless.

The second example is the first section of “Contemplation Basket” from the latest volume, Breathing Tokens. Note how colors are still in this poem of an older writer.

The flamewash swim of five scarlet fish
gives eyes a deed of motion and light.
One fast line of a redbird flight
can hold the heart of a sunrise cry.
A basket of yellow corn,
a bowl of black-and-gold pansies,
may feed hungering blood and thirsting eyes.
The slide of a spotted snake to a slant of sun
or the flagrance of the June bloom of peonies
or the laughter of a bushel of new potatoes—
they may speak to the eyes and the blood.
The hushed rituals of gold and shadow
move over summer oats, over harvest corn. …(11)

The first of the parallel poems appeared in The New Yorker for January 23 of this year, and is by Louise Glück, a thirty-five-year-old New York poet much in vogue. The poem is her reaction to a painting in a museum. The lines are short, irregular, unrhymed. The language is uncomplicated, apparently naive, for there are many monosyllabic words. Comparison with Sandburg can be made in line structure, diction, mood, theme. Called “The Sick Child (Study in Oils),” it reads, in part:

A small child
is ill, has wakened.
.....And the child
relaxes in her mother's arms.
The mother does not sleep;
she stares
fixedly into the bright museum.
By spring the child will die.
Then it is wrong, wrong
to hold her—
let her be alone,
without memory. …(12)

And now, excerpts from several poets born in the mid-1920's. First, three men, friends at Harvard, leaders in the group in the fifties called the “New York Poets.” Their urbanism links them to Sandburg as does their imagery, drawn from the little acts of daily life that add up to significance for the unpretentious and unprestigious man. Here is the first stanza of “A Step Away from Them,” by Frank O'Hara:

It's my lunch hour, so I go
for a walk among the mum-colored
cabs. First, down the sidewalk
where laborers feed their dirty
glistening torsos sandwiches
and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets
on. They protect them from falling
bricks, I guess. Then onto the
avenue where skirts are flipping
above heels and blow up over
grates. The sun is hot, but the
cabs stir up the air. I look
at bargains in wristwatches. There
are cats playing in sawdust.(13)

Could not Sandburg have collected these details, adding up to a summer noon in the city?

The second in this group, by John Ashbery, is the sestet of the first of “Two Sonnets,” in which you will seek in vain the rhyme scheme set down by Petrarch or Shakespeare. Intimacy, color, and popular culture crowd into these six lines:

The iodine bottle sat in the hall
And out over the park where crawled roadsters
The apricot and purple clouds were
And our blood flowed down the grating
Of the cream-colored embassy.
Inside it they had a record of “The St. Louis Blues.”(14)

In Kenneth Koch's poem called “Thanksgiving,” the first two stanzas are marked by Sandburgian colors and fantasies:

What's sweeter than at the end of a summer's day
To suddenly drift away
From the green match-wrappers in an open pocket-book
And be part of the boards of a tavern?
A tavern made of new wood.
There's an orange-red sun in the sky
And a redskin is hunting for you underneath ladders of timber.
I will buy this tavern. Will you buy this tavern? I do.(15)

Now we move to the countryside. David Wagoner is, like Sandburg, of Midwest origin. Like Sandburg he has a keen eye for the phenomena of nature. Moreover, his lines are unrhymed, his diction plain. Like Sandburg he can make nature strange, a cause for wonder. Here is part of a poem Wagnor has called “The Poets Agree to Be Quiet by the Swamp”:

Strokes of light like heron's legs in the cattails,
Mud underneath, frogs lying even deeper.
Therefore the poets may keep quiet.
But the corners of their mouths grin past their hands.
They stick their elbows out into the evening,
Stoop, and begin the ancient croaking.(16)

The next poet is Galway Kinnell. He here addresses a chief American poet to champion the challenges of rhyme and of high discipline in the classic sense. The colloquial style would be close to Sandburg's heart. This is the first of five sections:

Why do you talk so much
Robert Frost? One day
I drove up to Ripton to ask.
I stayed the whole day
And never got the chance
To put the question.
I drove off at dusk
Worn out and aching
In both ears. Robert Frost,
Were you shy as a boy?
Do you go on making up
For some long stint of solitude?
Is it simply that talk
Doesn't have to be metered and rhymed?
Or is gab distracting from something worse?(17)

The last excerpt is again from The New Yorker, January 30, this year. The poet, much older than the others I have been quoting, was seventy-three on April 24. A leading proponent of the New Criticism, he is editor of a new and monumental anthology of American literature. Robert Penn Warren has been inclined to patronize Sandburg, yet he can sound like this (the last eight lines of “Heart of a Backlog”):

Has the thought ever struck you to rise and go forth—yes, lost
In the whiteness—to never look upward, or back, only on,
And no sound but the snow-crunch, and breath
Gone crisp like the tearing of paper? Listen!
No, no—just a tree, far off, when ice inward bites.
No, no, don't look back—oh, I beg you!
I beg you not to look back, in God's name.(18)

Possibly someone is warning Lot's wife here, but don't I catch the echo of a familiar voice: “The past is a bucket of ashes”?

I am firmly convinced that these seven poets I have quoted would not sound as they do if Sandburg, beginning in 1914, had not made those initial explorations.

Now let me quote, finally, from a poem in Breathing Tokens. It is called “Poplars” and will remind us once more of how our poet sounds. Note, in the three-line song of the trees at the end, the beautiful word “loaf” that Whitman loved so much.

A few poplars standing to the west
And one star and two stars and three,
And a sky changing every so little
.....And to this a few poplars singing, strumming
Steady to the wind their music:
                    This fills an evening hour.
                    Here we loaf an hour, half a night.
                    Here we find who keeps our memory.(19)

If this new volume neither adds to nor subtracts from Sandburg's status as a poet, it nevertheless does give us a further opportunity to feel his emotions, envision his scenes, flavor his diction, absorb his themes. Reading the reviews, one senses that the condescensions of the Eliotic era are fading before the important truth that Sandburg has been a vital element in the history of twentieth-century poetry. Karl Shapiro makes no bones about it. Himself a poet of no mean reputation, he sees Sandburg as being as strong an influence on American verse as Pound or William Carlos Williams. Today's poets have in him a model for their own free verse, language experiments, street argot. He could indeed be called “the first American Street Poet,” such as one sees and hears nowadays in city taverns and campus hangouts. Sandburg would appreciate the current drive for equality. He would applaud the loud, corny sentimentality. If we can judge by his letters and by anecdotes about him, he would be amused and diverted by the vulgar epithets and the obscenities that go beyond frankness. If Sandburg lacks the gifts of prophecy claimed for Whitman, the master craftsmanship ascribed to Frost, and the “subterranean spirit” associated with Poe, he at least has not been relegated to the arid theories of the academics who are tearing Pound and Eliot apart.

V. S. Pritchett said recently, “To end not with a bang but a whimper may have suited the twenties, but it is useless now.”²⁰ We might add that it was always useless to Sandburg. The poets of the present generation (beginning with the tiny tyros of the public elementary schools on through college to Warren himself) are nearer to him at this moment than they may realize or are willing to admit. He continues to loom large and serene as a major poet in our time.

Notes

1. See Helga Sandburg, A Great and Glorious Romance (New York: Harcourt, 1978).

2. The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg, rev. ed. (New York: Harcourt, 1976), pp. 166, 64, 17. All quotations from Sandburg's poems are from this edition, and hereafter page numbers will be given in parentheses.

3. Richard Crowder, Carl Sandburg (New York: Twayne, 1964), p. 87.

4. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, in The Complete Poems and Plays (New York: Harcourt, 1952), p. 45.

5. Richard Crowder, “Sandburg's Chromatic Vision in Honey and Salt,” in The Vision of this Land, ed. John E. Hallwas and Dennis J. Reader (Macomb: Western Illinois University, 1976), pp. 92-104.

6. Louis D. Rubin, Jr., “Chicago Revisited,” Hopkins Review, 4 (Winter 1951), pp. 63-69.

7. Louis D. Rubin, Jr., Review of Breathing Tokens, The New Republic, 28 Jan. 1978, pp. 35-36.

8. Allen Ginsberg, “Howl,” in American Poetry and Prose, 5th ed., ed. Norman Foerster, et al. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), p. 1471.

9. Karl Shapiro, Review of Breathing Tokens, Chicago Tribune, 1 Jan. 1978, sec. 7, p. 1.

10. Ginsberg, “In Back of the Real,” in American Poetry and Prose, p. 1479.

11. Carl Sandburg, “Contemplation Basket,” in Breathing Tokens, ed. Margaret Sandburg (New York: Harcourt, 1978), p. 170. Copyright 1978 by Maurice C. Greenbaum and Frank M. Parker, Trustees of the Sandburg Family Trust, copyright 1978 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the publishers.

12. Louise Glück, “The Sick Child (Study in Oils),” The New Yorker, 23 Jan. 1978, p. 46.

13. Frank O'Hara, “A Step Away from Them,” in The Voice That Is Great Within Us, ed. Hayden Carruth (New York: Bantam, 1970), p. 586.

14. John Ashbery, “Two Sonnets,” in The Voice That Is Great Within Us, p. 593.

15. Kenneth Koch, “Thanksgiving,” in The Voice That Is Great Within Us, p. 545.

16. David Wagoner, “The Poets Agree to Be Quiet by the Swamp,” in The Voice That Is Great Within Us; p. 589.

17. Galway Kinnell, “For Robert Frost,” in The Voice That Is Great Within Us, p. 600.

18. Robert Penn Warren, “Heart of a Backlog,” The New Yorker, 30 Jan. 1978, p. 34.

19. Carl Sandburg, “Poplars,” in Breathing Tokens, p. 73.

20. V. S. Pritchett, “An Exile's Luggage,” The New Yorker, 20 March 1978, p. 146.