A Poet of the Masses

...His determination to make The American Songbag (1927) the most complete anthology of folk music up to that time brought on a nervous breakdown, but he managed to finish it...

...There was in him a passion or sympathy for anything downtrodden or hurt and a vitality...which made everyone love him...

...Charlie put in a year delivering milk for a local dairy, but he longed to follow the trains that ran through Galesburg on their way out West...

...At the time the Sandburgs were living in the South, but "the eternal hobo" was often in Chicago, using the city as abase for lecture tours...

...That Margaret and Helga both became writers seems to have been as much Paula's doing as Carl's...

...In 1914EuniceTietjens, Harriet Monroe's assistant editor at Poetry magazine, described him as a "tall, somewhat gawky Scandinavian, always badly dressed, always fomenting in spirit...

...Niven therefore reminds readers that he was once considered a ground-breaking Modernist, admired by the likes of Ezra Pound, Rebecca West (who called him the Midwest's Robert Burns) and Robert Frost...

...Niven divides her book into four sections: "The Prairie Years" (1878-1911) chronicles Sandburg's youth in Illinois and his Socialist days in eastern Wisconsin...

...One of the oddest and most telling incidents she reports concerns the 79-year-old Carl's "affair" with Donna Workman, a Chicago businesswoman nearly half his age...

...He was the shy yet ambitious teenage son of hard-working, dirt poor Swedish immigrants, and had been born right there in the little prairie town of Galesburg, Illinois, in 1878...

...Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, or Frost...

...In fact, a large number of readers have been won over to modern poetry by cutting their teeth on the attractive work of these writers...

...This is the very quality Penelope Niven has captured...

...In a turgid, multi-generational novel, Remembrance Rock (1948), Sandburg sought to encompass the entire sweep of American history...

...Sandburg makes a slightly larger-than-life protagonist...

...To Niven's credit, she demonstrates throughout why Sandburg commanded great love and respect without neglecting his blind spots or his propensity to cannibalize the lives of those close to him...

...By no stretch of the imagination will he ever be classed with T.S...

...Sandburg, in turn, encouraged many "difficult" poets, including Wallace Stevens...

...Years afterward he reminisced: "I was meeting fellow travelers and fellow Americans...

...If his verse all too frequently reads like the rhetoric of a stemwinding oration, his political pieces often drive home their points with poetic force...

...Niven's much lengthier portrait gives Sandburg's romanticism due recognition, but also recognizes just what a complex and contradictory figure he could be: a husband who called his talented, intelligent wife (the sister of photographer Edward Steichen) "dream girl, comrade and pal" until the day he died, yet left her at home with insufficient money to care for their three daughters—two with severe problems—while he gallivanted across the country delivering lectures and wooing other women...

...Niven's account of how Paula became a celebrated authority on goat breeding is a delight...

...The people he had encountered and the life he experienced, however, changed his perspective forever...

...a populist who eventually tended to perform for the bosses rather than the laborers...

...His older sister required every spare penny so that she might finish high school and receive her teacher's diploma...

...The energy some poets put into perfecting their craft he devoted to creating a persona of heroic dimensions...

...Because Sandburg forged his style on such populist models as William Jennings Bryan and Jack London, his proletarian romanticism sounds so dated to our ears today that it has become difficult to objectively assess his writings...

...Not for nothing had he honed his skills in small-town oratory contests, practicing his speeches on "cornstalks and cabbage heads" in the days when he worked as a traveling salesman...

...I was working out of my bashfulness...

...No one who met Carl Sandburg after he became a famous poet, Socialist political organizer, children's writer, Abraham Lincoln scholar, and folk singer ever thought of him as diffident...

...In "The Lincoln Years" (1926-1945) he wrestles with the gargantuan biography as well as with the crushing reality of eldest child Margaret's epilepsy and another daughter's mental retardation...

...Above all, she stressed the proletarian aspect of his poetry—his celebrating steel workers, tramps, the struggles of immigrant settlers for a better life and of blacks for civil rights, even the seamier denizens of his beloved adopted city, Chicago, with its prostitutes and gangsters...

...he hoped it would sell to Hollywood...

...Sandburg repeatedly turned down Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish's offers to be poet-in-residence there, yet he clearly saw himself as America's laureate and occasionally penned torrents of poetry commemorating current events...

...Helga Sandburg's 1979 memoir of her parents, A Great and Glorious Romance: The Story of Carl Sandburg and Lilian Steichen, emphasized her father's idealism about the American people, evident in his early Socialist canvassing throughout Wisconsin and in his preservation of folk music and historical lore...

...Assessed by that criterion, the more vigorous parts of Sandburg's output certainly do stand tall...

...Over and over, he came up with grandiose titles for his verse collections: Smoke and Steel (1920), Slabs of the Sunburnt West (1922), or The People, Yes (1936...

...The final section, "The Connemara Years" (1946-1967), named after Lilian "Paula" Sandburg's goat farm, details the fame the poet reaped in old age and his battle with his youngest offspring, Helga, who was trying to develop her own writing career...

...But he was never one to keep things in separate compartments...

...he transformed himself into a consummate performer...

...Sure, he was a ham, but one on a par with John Barrymore...

...One cheers for this splendid woman, who always provided a loving and stable home for her family and somehow pursued her own interests...

...In The People, Yes, Sandburg described himself, with characteristic flamboyance, as One of the early Chicago poets One of the slouching underslung Chicago poets, Having only the savvy God gave him, Lacking a gat, lacking brass knucks, Having one lead pencil to spare Corny, yes, but endearing...

...He spoke to us about Lincoln, and we felt we were being addressed by the great President's avatar...

...Still, Niven makes a strong case that he belongs in the company of lesser immortals: Sara Teasdale,Vachel Lindsay, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Witter Bynner, Edgar Lee Masters —all influential and interesting enough to warrant preservation in anthologies...

...She ultimately succeeded in breaking up the romance, though Sandburg continued to form attachments to women—including, briefly, Marilyn Monroe—right up to his last illness...

...an admirer of Lincoln who, to prepare a massive study of the President's efforts to preserve the Union, moved to an antebellum plantation in North Carolina and resided in a house built by a member of Jefferson Davis' secessionist cabinet...

...The long-suffering Paula resented the scandal (despite her husband's claims that the relationship was platonic), but more so the energy devoted to what she shrewdly recognized as a wasted project...

...Nevertheless, he shares the stage with his dynamic, strongwilled wife...

...As Penelope Niven's new biography, Carl Sandburg (Scribners, 843 pp., $35.00) argues, he reproduced his adolescent exhilaration at role playing by mo ving from one arena to the next, dazzling different audiences and tackling new projects...

...But in any biography it is his adventurous life that is bound to absorb the reader's interest, leaving his literary reputation as a secondary matter...

...All his life he remained an unashamed propagandist for any cause that captured his imagination: Eugene Debs' Socialist movement at the turn of the century, Roosevelt's New Deal, the War effort, Adlai E. Stevenson's Presidential campaigns against Dwight D. Eisenhower, and hundreds of others...

...What they were doing to my heart and mind, my personality, I couldn't say then [but] I was getting to be a better storyteller...

...Although he completed the eighth grade, he missed his graduation because his parents could not afford to buy him a suit...

...I saw him in my childhood and will always carry the memory of him reading "Chicago" in his mesmerizing voice...

...Edward Steichen played a central role in the family, too, and his artistic aims form an interesting counterpart to those of his brother-in-law...

...Flattered by Workman's admiration and sympathetic to her idealism in founding an employment agency for slum dwellers, he began to stay with her when he was in town, and wrote love letters and mushy verse whenever they were apart...

...So he quit his job to become a "gay-cat" —the kind of hobo who rode the boxcars from place to place, doing chores in exchange for a meal, clothes or a bed at night...

...Workman became his manager, and tried to engineer a movie contract for Remembrance Rock...

...People who saw the Grand Old Man in later years preserve an image of a face as chiseled and aweinspiring as those on Mount Rushmore, of a dramatic shock of heavy white hair that he tossed back off his forehead as he spoke or sang, of a deep, mellow, persuasive voice...

...You can be loose and easy when from day to day you meet strangers you will know only for an hour or a day or two...

...During "The Chicago Years" we see him establish himself as a poet and write his popular Rootabega Stories for children while he works as a newspaper man...

...Everything Sandburg undertook had to be a mammoth project.Noauthor sinceCharles Dickensgaveso many readings...

...Three months later, homesick, he headed back to Illinois...