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Carl Sandburg |
Carl Sandburg came to poetry late and with a full heart. After twenty years as a cornhusker, hobo, coal heaver in Omaha, union organizer in Milwaukee, soldier in Puerto Rico, and newsman in Chicago, he started to write, speak, and sing about the American people. His first book came out when he was thirty-eight. And even then he wasn’t sure that his loose-limbed, socialist, free verse was even poetry.
His second book (1918) won him a Pulitzer Prize. His biography of Lincoln earned him a second Pulitzer and enough money to buy his own farm. His Complete Poems (1951) won him a third. As “The American Vagabond”, he went on the speaker circuit with his old guitar and a voice like the prairie wind, talking about Walt Whitman and Abe Lincoln, reciting his poems, and playing folk songs he had collected over the years. He was a great showman, and the older he got the more people loved him.
In his long, last poem, The People, Yes, and in his introduction to The Family of Man, an exhibit of photographs that toured the world, he wrote about the “toil, struggle, blood and dreams, among lovers, workers, loafers, fighters, players, gamblers; landlords and the landless; the loved and the unloved; the brutal and the compassionate—one big family hugging close to the ball of Earth for its life and being.”
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Immortal Poets: Their Lives and Verse, by Christopher Burns |