The first time I read Carl Sandburg I was in high school wherein the words, ‘Hog Butcher for the world,’ composed the first line of text, which is of course the first line to his famous poem “Chicago”. I recall not knowing what to make of the poem upon my teenaged read, as I always preferred to reexamine poetry multiple times. But I always remembered it. The poem puts me in mind of Upton Sinclair’s well-known novel The Jungle, which is also set in Chicago, and both Sandburg and Sinclair share a love for exposing the political underbelly of culture. It has been argued that Sandburg is a Neglected Poet in that, while his reputation is not obscure, it perhaps should be grander than it is.
At his best, Carl Sandburg is an excellent poet that does not steer away from the grit and dirt of life—the life of the struggling poor, or just his love of city and nature. At his worst, he can at times veer into preaching cliché (however minimally) and his lesser poems don’t hold the heft as those of someone like Robinson Jeffers or Wallace Stevens. But while Jeffers and Stevens are more philosophical, Sandburg is more social.
Take, for example, his short poem “Trafficker”:
Among the shadows where two streets cross,
A woman lurks in the dark and waits
To move on when a policeman heaves in view.
Smiling a broken smile from a face
Painted over haggard bones and desperate eyes,
All night she offers passers-by what they will
Of her beauty wasted, body faced, claims gone,
And no takers.
This is quite a good poem about a prostitute. The language reads rather straightforwardly and, while there are no deft plays off words like one would witness in a Stevens poem, it works. Carl Sandburg manages to capture a pathos within an image—resembling a black and white photograph that one finds years later. The emotion isn’t as accessible and he doesn’t force sentimentality and social guilt the way one would find from some MFA writer.
Smiling a broken smile from a face
Painted over haggard bones and desperate eyes,
The above lines are a unique way to describe someone destitute, without resorting to bathos or cliché. This is perhaps the only time someone has really looked at her, ‘Of her beauty wasted, body faced, claims gone, / And no takers.’ This poem offers a good introduction into Carl Sandburg’s impetus—he desired to showcase the downtrodden and the often unseen. Take this next poem on a dying solder as example:
Murmurings in a Field Hospital
[They picked him up in the grass where he had lain two
days in the rain with a piece of shrapnel in his lungs.]
Come to me only with playthings now. . .
A picture of a singing woman with blue eyes
Standing at a fence of hollyhocks, poppies and sunflowers. . .
Or an old man I remember sitting with children telling stories
Of days that never happened anywhere in the world. . .
No more iron cold and real to handle,
Shaped for a drive straight ahead.
Bring me only beautiful useless things.
Only old home things touched at sunset in the quiet. . .
And at the window one day in summer
Yellow of the new crock of butter
Stood against the red of new climbing roses. . .
And the world was all playthings.
This is an outstanding poem. Capturing a Whitmanesque theme, we are imagining a dying soldier but this time we are witnessing what he is longing for on the inside. Rather than indulging in the ‘life flashing before your eyes,’ we are given a list of comforts that this dying soldier is revisiting in his mind.
Come to me only with playthings now. . .
A picture of a singing woman with blue eyes
Standing at a fence of hollyhocks, poppies and sunflowers. . .
Or an old man I remember sitting with children telling stories
Of days that never happened anywhere in the world. . .
Note he says, ‘An old man he remembers…’ rather than simply an old man as himself. ‘A picture’ of a singing woman, rather than the woman as herself. Telling stories/Of days that never happened anywhere in the world. . .
No more iron cold and real to handle,
Shaped for a drive straight ahead.
Bring me only beautiful useless things.
Only old home things touched at sunset in the quiet. . .
The dying man wants only solace found in ‘beautiful useless things’ as a remedy to his current pain.
And at the window one day in summer
Yellow of the new crock of butter
Stood against the red of new climbing roses. . .
And the world was all playthings.
This is a very touching way to end the poem—especially the last line, which brings back the mind of a child. This dying man who has undergone trauma due to war wants only to feel the comfort from his childhood in his final moments, even though he knows they are not within his reach. A lesser poet would have indulged in bathos—trite images however heartfelt. Here, nostalgia, love, fantasy and childhood are not directly mentioned but implied.
Now to show his range, onto a poem that involves the artistic process:
Last Answers
I wrote a poem on the mist
And woman asked me what I meant by it.
I had thought till then only of the beauty of the mist, how
pearl and gray of it mix and reel,
And change the drab shanties with lighted lamps at evening
into points of mystery quivering with color.
I answered:
The whole world was mist once long ago and some day
it will all go back to mist,
Our skulls and lungs are more water than bone and tissue
And all poets love dust and mist because all the last
answers
Go running back to dust and mist.
This poem puts me in mind of Robinson Jeffers in how Carl Sandburg combines both nature and art with his strong narrative. While not as nature oriented as Jeffers (‘I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk;’), Sandburg’s propensity for the political and cultural reveals he had more human interest than Jeffers. (He won a Pulitzer for not only his poetry but also for his biography on Abraham Lincoln.)
I wrote a poem on the mist
And woman asked me what I meant by it.
I had thought till then only of the beauty of the mist, how
pearl and gray of it mix and reel,
And change the drab shanties with lighted lamps at evening
into points of mystery quivering with color.
The poem begins with a good use of music and narrative. The opening reads simply and straightforwardly without much jargon. Alliteration can be heard through his use of words, ‘mist’, ‘meant,’ ‘it,’ ‘mix’, ‘mystery’, all which flow naturally.
I answered:
The whole world was mist once long ago and some day
it will all go back to mist,
Our skulls and lungs are more water than bone and tissue
And all poets love dust and mist because all the last
answers
Go running back to dust and mist.
For a short poem, much philosophy is addressed. We go from the beginning of time, to the circle of life, to then addressing the question by referring to the answer. Narratively, he not only introduces the idea of the ‘circle of life’ (all the while avoiding the triteness of such a phrase) through his actual word choices: ‘The whole world was mist once long ago and some day/ it will all go back to mist,’ but also via his narrative setup. The ending, which includes his answer, refers back to the title. This poem could be read over and again and there would still be no answers just as there will be endless answers.
Carl Sandburg certainly put much work into his use of language. Consider the following poem as example:
Languages
There are no handles upon a language
Whereby men take hold of it
And mark it with signs for its remembrance.
It is a river, this language,
Once in a thousand years
Breaking a new course
Changing its way to the ocean.
It is mountain effluvia
Moving to valleys
And from nation to nation
Crossing borders and mixing.
Languages die like rivers.
Words wrapped round your tongue today
And broken to shape of thought
Between your teeth and lips speaking
Now and today
Shall be faded hieroglyphics
Ten thousand years from now.
Sing—and singing—remember
Your song dies and changes
And is not here to-morrow
Any more than the wind
Blowing ten thousand years ago.
This is an excellent poem with a narrative that blends one image into the next, all the while resembling a river itself. He is playing off the cliché ‘the river of time’ and evoking the ephemera of life, the ephemera of language, the ephemera of all that is man-made:
There are no handles upon a language
Whereby men take hold of it
And mark it with signs for its remembrance.
Language is not material and it cannot be contained. Sandburg’s imagery flows musically and naturally.
It is a river, this language,
Once in a thousand years
Breaking a new course
Changing its way to the ocean.
It is mountain effluvia
Moving to valleys
And from nation to nation
Crossing borders and mixing.
When one reads enough poetry, he or she cannot help but think that one person’s verse evokes another. I can see how a poet like Kenneth Rexroth studied Carl Sandburg, albeit Sandburg has better enjambment and is overall tighter than Rexroth. Again, the poem continues with strong narrative:
Languages die like rivers.
Words wrapped round your tongue today
And broken to shape of thought
Between your teeth and lips speaking
Now and today
Shall be faded hieroglyphics
Ten thousand years from now.
Phrases like ‘broken to shape of thought/between your teeth and lips speaking’ lift the poem out of nebulousness. How easy it would be for a lesser writer to engage in amorphous platitude instead. Here, Sandburg is not merely speaking about the idea of language but that language is a physical thing that can wrap, break, shape and pass among teeth and lips and that all this too is ephemeral.
Sing—and singing—remember
Your song dies and changes
And is not here to-morrow
Any more than the wind
Blowing ten thousand years ago.
Basically, humans need to know their place—like their very languages, they will not outlast time. And the final line is a nod to Melville’s last line in Moby-Dick, a writer Sandburg championed. This poem also puts me in mind of Stevens’s last stanza of “The Snowman”:
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
While Sandburg’s poem is not as philosophical as Stevens, both poems evoke a similar idea with regard to presence. Overall, Sandburg is more grounded within his oeuvre, and perhaps for this reason is slightly more accessible than Stevens, who usually will require multiple readings before understanding.
Carl Sandburg certainly holds his place within American Letters, and he is an accessible poet for young poets to study, due to his ‘human-driven’ approach. He does not engage in lofty language and he manages the political without compromising craft. One might say that Sandburg wrote about humans, that Stevens wrote about the idea of humans and that Jeffers rejected humans altogether.
If you are reading this, then you are likely a human and so this pertains to you. Seek Sandburg, all. I’ll end now with a line from his most well-known poem, “Chicago”:
They tell me you are wicked and I believe them.
Addendum: Bonus Poem. In completing this essay, I happened to reread this wonderful poem about a military leader. Per Sandburg: what do these leaders really think of you, reader? The answer’s in the title.
Statistics
Napoleon shifted,
Restless in the old sarcophagus
And murmured to a watchguard:
“Who goes there?”
“Twenty-one million men,
Soldiers, armies, guns,
Twenty-one million
Afoot, horseback,
In the air,
Under the sea.”
And Napoleon turned to his sleep:
“It is not my world answering;
It is some dreamer who knows not
The world I marched in
From Calais to Moscow.”
And he slept on
In the old sarcophagus
While the aeroplanes
Droned their motors
Between Napoleon’s mausoleum
And the cool night stars.
* * *
If you enjoyed this piece, check out the automachination YouTube channel and the ArtiFact Podcast. Recent episodes include a dissection of Steven Pinker’s pollyanna philosophy, an in-depth look at Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘Cat’s Cradle’, and a broad discussion of aesthetics between painter Ethan Pinch and writer Alex Sheremet.