I saw a sickly cellar plant
Droop on its feeble stem, for want
Of sun and wind and rain and dew—
Of freedom!—Then a man came through
The cellar, and I heard him say,
“Poor, foolish plant, by all means stay
Contented here: for—know you not?—
This stagnant dampness, mould and rot
Are your incentive to grow tall
And reach that sunbeam on the wall.”
—Even as he spoke, the sun’s one spark
Withdrew, and left the dusk more dark.
_Carl Sandburg_
Carl (August) Sandburg was born of Swedish stock at Galesburg,
Illinois, January 6, 1878. His schooling was haphazard; at thirteen
he went to work on a milk wagon. During the next six years he was,
in rapid succession, porter in a barber-shop, scene-shifter in a
cheap theatre, truck-handler in a brickyard, turner apprentice in a
pottery, dish-washer in Denver and Omaha hotels, harvest hand in
Kansas wheat fields. These tasks equipped him, as no amount of
learning could have done, to be the laureate of industrial America.
When war with Spain was declared in 1898, Sandburg, avid for fresh
adventure, enlisted in Company C., Sixth Illinois Volunteers.
On his return from the campaign in Porto Rico, Sandburg entered
Lombard College in Galesburg and, for the first time, began to think
in terms of literature. He had already seen a great deal of the
world from the roaring alleys of great cities as well as from the
underside of box-cars; he had loafed, fought and expressed himself
richly. So, what with the fact that the “terrible Swede,” as captain
of the basket-ball team, won a series of new victories, it is little
wonder that he was idolized by his class-mates and elected
editor-in-chief of the college paper.
After leaving college he did all manner of things to earn a living.
He was advertising manager for a department store and worked as
district organizer for the Social-Democratic party of Wisconsin. He
became a salesman, a pamphleteer, a newspaperman. On the staff of a
business magazine, he became a “safety first” expert; his articles
on accident prevention bringing him before manufacturers’
conventions where he talked about machinery safeguards and methods
found successful in reducing injuries in factory organizations.
In 1904, Sandburg published the proverbial “slender sheaf”; a tiny
pamphlet of twenty-two poems, uneven in quality but strangely like
the work of the mature Sandburg in feeling. What is more, these
experiments anticipated the very inflection of the later poems, with
their spiritual kinship to Henley, Lincoln and Whitman; several of
these early experiments (with the exception of the rhymed verses)
might be placed, without seeming incongruous, in the most recent
collection of Sandburg’s pieces. The idiom of _Smoke and Steel_
(1920) is more intensified, but it is the same idiom as that of
“Milville” (1903), which begins:
Down in southern New Jersey they make glass.
By day and by night, the fires burn on in Milville and bid the sand
let in the light.
Meanwhile the newspaperman was having a hard struggle to keep the
poet alive. Until he was thirty-six years old, Sandburg was totally
unknown to the literary world. In 1914 a group of his poems appeared
in _Poetry; A Magazine of Verse_; later the same year one of the
group (the now famous “Chicago”) was awarded the Levinson prize of
two hundred dollars. A little more than a year later his first,
full-fledged book was published, and Sandburg—tardily but
triumphantly—had arrived.
_Chicago Poems_ (1916) is full of ferment; it seethes with a direct
poetry surcharged with tremendous energy. Here is an almost animal
exultation that is also an exaltation. Sandburg’s speech is simple
and powerful; he uses slang as freely (and beautifully) as his
predecessors used the now archaic tongue of their times. (See
Preface.) Immediately the cries of protest were heard: Sandburg was
coarse and brutal; his work ugly and distorted; his language,
unrefined, unfit for poetry. His detractors forgot that Sandburg was
only brutal when dealing with brutality; that beneath his toughness,
he was one of the tenderest of living poets; that, when he used
colloquialisms and a richly metaphorical slang, he was searching for
new poetic values in “limber, lasting, fierce words”—unconsciously
answering Whitman who asked, “Do you suppose the liberties and brawn
of These States have to do only with delicate lady-words? With
gloved gentleman-words?”
_Cornhuskers_ (1918) is another step forward; it is fully as
sweeping as its forerunner and far more sensitive. The gain in power
and restraint is evident in the very first poem, a magnificent
panoramic vision of the prairie. Here is something of the surge of a
Norse saga; _Cornhuskers_ is keen with a salty vigor, a vast
sympathy for all that is splendid and terrible in Nature. But the
raw violence is restrained to the point of mysticism. There are, in
this volume, dozens of those delicate perceptions of beauty that
must astonish those who think that Sandburg can write only a
big-fisted, rough-neck sort of poetry. “Cool Tombs,” one of the most
poignant lyrics of our time, moves with a new music; “Grass”
whispers as quietly as the earlier “Fog” stole in on stealthy, cat
feet.
_Smoke and Steel_ (1920) is the synthesis and sublimation of its
predecessors. In this ripest of his collections, Sandburg has fused
mood, accent and image in a new intensity. It is a fit setting for
the title-poem; it is, in spite of certain over-mystical accents, an
epic of industrialism. Smoke-belching chimneys are here, quarries
and great boulders of iron-ribbed rock; here are titanic visions:
the dreams of men and machinery. And silence is here—the silence of
sleeping tenements and sun-soaked cornfields. _Smoke and Steel_ is a
rich amalgam; indigenous to the core. And what makes it so vital is
Sandburg’s own spirit: a never-sated joy in existence, a continually
fresh delight in the variety and wonder of life.