The People's Poet

...On Poetry THE PEOPLE'S POET BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL JL^F orn 100 years ago, Carl Sandburg was at his death in 1967 one of America's most celebrated and honored authors The pundits of the poetry world, however, had snubbed him for decades For the breezy optimism of Chicago Poems had preceded Prufrock and Other Observations by only one year, and it seemed somewhat out of place in the 20th century "Ethics and Art cannot be married," cried Conrad Aiken Robert Frost gleefully reported as someone else's witticism that Sandburg "was the kind of writer who had everything to gam and nothing to lose by being translated into another language " Writing to Sandburg, Ezra Pound agreed that nothing like "jazz rhythms" had ever been seen before in poetry, but politely hinted that it wouldn't hurt to pay a little more attention to tradition "What I am getting at, is that sometimes your dialect or your argot seems to me not the best way, not the most controlled way but simply the easiest way If you had the patience to listen to an old maid like myself it would put more weight in your hammer " Sandburg did not have the patience "I'm off the literary, even the poetry crowd lately," he announced scornfully to his editor at Poetry magazine "I like my politics straight and prefer the frank politics of the political world to the politics of the literary world " Over the years, as modern criticism discovered from Eliot, and later from Robert Lowell, that Hell is an enervated city much like Boston, Sandburg continued to exhort generations of schoolchildren to believe that the spirit of poetry was incarnate in Chicago?Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Marker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroad and Freight Handler to the Nation " Well, "here he is again, the old idealist, fighter, philosopher, dreamer, and poet, still with something to say," writes daughter Margaret Sandburg, who has edited Breathing Tokens (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 177 pp , $8 95), a collection of 118 previously unpublished poems The centenary contribution of the poet's youngest daughter, novelist Helga Sandburg, is A Great & Glorious Romance (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 319 pp , $12 95), a fascinating and multifaceted biography of Sandburg and his "wife and pal," Lilian Steichen While the new poems are of much the same quality as the known body of Sandburg's verse, the biography is a fresh insight into the man—before he became the folksy, guitar-strumming skald of his later years By skillfully resurrecting the young revolutionary and his era, Helga reminds us that her father kept true to his aspiration to live and write always as "the spokesman of the People " Sandburg met Lilian (the sister of photographer Edward Steichen, whose eloquent portraits grace both books) in Milwaukee in 1907, through their involvement in the Socialist party Almost 30, he had been a house painter, hobo, traveling salesman, hired hand, Army private during the Spanish-American War, and college student (despite having only an eighth grade education), and was now a Socialist organizer and part-time journalist She was a small-town school teacher, but her brother had alreadv made a name for himself in the art world, lived in Paris, and was a friend of Rodin When Sandburg gave her a copy of...

...Dream Girl," a poem he had prmted privately in college, she replied acerbly, "In our Epoch of Struggle girls must be made of sterner stuff Too bad, but it's so Under capitalism your dream girl must be a leisure class product " Taking the hint, he sent her some political poems the next time and received a gratifying response "Oh, if I had a volume of your poems, dear Poet-of-Our-World-Today, it would not stand dusty on the shelf but would be read and wrestled with for the life-strength it could give " Her belief in his writing never faltered, and she proved the strength of her conviction by quietly staying at home to manage his secretarial work and the raising of their three daughters during his frequent trips around the country to meet "the People " Helga writes frankly of her mother's loneliness It was not easy for this intelligent woman to be the helpmeet of someone so stubbornly independent, yet she chose to remain his "dear comrade" throughout almost 60 years of marriage "It has been said by some," observes the author, "that my mother's talents were turned aside by the power of my father's gemus I never thought it was so It seems clear that she made her own decision Because my mother took the ancient female way, insisting on his dominant role in their life, she may have been wise " Whatever abilities Lilian Steichen may have turned aside, her letters and life reveal that her chief talent was for loving It seems unlikely that anyone else could have held Sandburg's affection, or kept him constant to one course, she always stayed "Paula," the dream girl of his verse If the Socialists had been more successful, Sandburg might have opted for politics instead of poetry When the party came to power in Milwaukee in 1910, with the election of Emil Seidel as mayor, Sandburg was named first secretary, he later became propagandist for the administration But by 1912, political sympathies in Wisconsin had shifted, Seidel had been chosen Vice Presidential running mate for one of Eugene Debs' forlorn national campaigns, and Sandburg was m Chicago, jobless, trying to make a name in the literary world His break came m 1914, when Harriet Monroe headlined "Chicago" in her experimental magazine, Poetry The opening line ("Hog Butcher for the World"), the journalistic language and the exuberantly brutal depiction of urban low-life grabbed the reader's attention—the poem was unforgettable V JL...

...rom then on, Sandburg's reputation was assured Critical disapproval, which has embittered and destroyed many poets, did not ruffle him, because he was always able to hold a popular audience Over the next 20 years, his volumes—including Cornhuskers, Smoke and Steel, Slabs of the Sunburnt West, Good Morning, America, and The People, Yes—celebrated the ordinary lives and aspirations of Americans He left the Socialists when the party opposed the Umted States' entrance into World War I, sticking for the rest of his life to the mainstream of populism as a Democrat Helga Sandburg ends her sensitive narration at the point where he was about to gain an even wider audience as Lincoln's hagiographer Breathing Tokens is fairly representative of Sandburg's techniques and themes, although it lacks the gusto of his best-known work "Mr Lincoln and His Gloves," a funny account of the contemporary social furor over that President's inability to keep a respectable pair of kidskin gloves, makes ungainly hands an effective symbol for a giant spirit "Guessers" is a Twaiman satire of yahoo scorn for new scientific discoveries "And now, bo, here's this Einstein /Good for a laugh in all the funny sections", unfortunately, it goes flat at the end by spelling out what has already been demonstrated Sandburg's strength lay in the vernacular, his "poetic" language could be disastrously bathetic—and often was "Nearer than any mother's heart wishes/now is heartbreak time," he wrote of the threat of war in 1938 Worse, "The hps of you are with me tonight /And the arms of you are a circle of white" rivals any entry in a school literary journal for cliche, triteness and awkward syntax Sandburg remained devoted to a dated imagism, to imitation haiku and to whimsy ("I am an ashcan I am a sensitive instrument") Moreover, a Whitmanesque expansionism impelled him to overstate, overenumerate, overexplain, indeed, to over-everything What Sandburg's poetry does not overdo is its deep belief in human dignity When used for this purpose, his loose forms and plain speech carry the message loud and clear In "Breathing Tokens" he writes "You must expect to be in several lost causes before you die /Why blame your father and mother for your being born, how could they help what they were doing7" The poem is an apology for man's unquenchable desire to live, even in adversity, and a plea to experience life as fully as possible Be sensitized with winter quicksilver below zero Be tongs and handles, find breathing tokens See where several good dreams are worth dying for Sandburg often proves, in other words, that Ethics and Art can be married It was, finally, the oversized enthusiasm the poet peddled that kept him out of sympathy with the main poetic influences in an era of pessimism (certain stylistic and philosophical affinities in the work of Allen Ginsburg probably derive less from Sandburg than from the same misreading of their common source—Whitman) But Carl Sandburg may prove to be vindicated "Chicago," "Gone," "Jazz Fantazia," and parts of that odd socio-poetical study, "The People, Yes," are doubtless closer to the most readers' idea of modern poetry than anything by Eliot, Stevens, Williams, or Lowell Who knows when a new populist verse may evolve out of Sandburg's generous and hopeful humanism'' Meanwhile, the labors of love his daughters have accomplished make it clear that the spirit of "the people's poet" has not been silenced...