Sandburg, Carl 1878-1967

SANDBURG, CARL 1878-1967

Poet

Origins

Born on a corn-husk mattress in a three-room shack and raised in the prairie town of Galeburg, Illinois, Carl Sandberg, who early changed his name to the more American-sounding Charles Sandburg, was the restless son of semiliterate Swedish immigrants. Sandburg's name change was an early, visible sign of his desire to establish an American identity for himself and to explore the nature of Americanness: in fact, these lifelong preoccupations prepared him to become one of the foremost poetic voices of the 1930s, the decade with which he is most closely associated. Sandburg was only eighteen when wanderlust propelled him out of his rural town and toward Chicago in 1896 and then across the country as part of the stream of hoboes and tramps whose continent-wide odyssey in search of employment prefìgured that of the railroad-hopping hoboes of the Depression. Sandburg's quest left him with the indelible images he would later use in his poetry taste for adventure. During his twenties Sandburg was a college student, a soldier, a traveling salesman, a journalist for several Milwaukee and Chicago papers, and an apprentice poet, who recorded his observations and his first attempts at verse in a series of journals. He published his first book of poetry, In Reckless Ecstasy, in 1904. He became active in Socialist politics, campaigning for Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene Debs in 1908, working as the secretary for the Socialist mayor of Milwaukee from 1910 to 1912, and writing Socialist pamphlets. When in 1907 Sandburg met Lillian Steichen, the sister of photographer Edward Steichen, his life changed dramatically. After a brief, primarily epistolary correspondence, the two married: she persuaded him to take back his given name and to try to integrate his American self and his immigrant Swedish self.

Growing Reputation

The publication of a group of Sandburg's poems in Harriet Monroe's magazine Poetry in 1914 signaled the emergence of a major American talent. The expectations of critics were met, if not exceeded, by the two books which followed, Chicago Poems in 1916 and Cornhuskers in 1918. In 1921 Sherwood Anderson declared Sandburg to be "of all the poets in America … my poet," and the following year Malcolm Cowley acclaimed him: "Sandburg writes American like a foreign language, like a language freshly acquired in which each word has a new and fascinating meaning." Cowley's praise echoed throughout the following decades, as writers struggled to reconcile the emphasis on language of the Imagist and modernist techniques with the American identity that was theirs. Sandburg, it seemed to many, was the poet best equipped for this sometimes daunting task. His accessible language, his populist concerns, and his graceful tone made him a favorite of audiences, though his reputation among critics had its ups and downs. As Newton Arvin wrote in The New Republic in 1936, "Of tenderness, of human feeling, of generous and robust sentiment, there is notoriously a great deal: of strong, sharp and ardent emotion, of the specific passion and intensity of poetry, there is singularly little." However, Sandburg's simplicity and optimism struck a chord for readers beaten down by the Depression, readers who found their experiences affirmed by the voice of the poet whose 1936 volume The People, Yes was a popular success. As Henry Steele Commager wrote, "Sandburg is the poet of the plain people, of farmers and steel workers and coal miners, of the housewife and the stenographer, and the streetwalker, too; of children at play and at work; of hoboes and bums; of soldiers—the privates, not the officers—of Negroes as of whites, of immigrants as of natives—of The People, Yes."

Biography

Even as Sandburg was building his reputation with such volumes as Smoke and Steel (1920) and Good Morning, America (1928), he was becoming known for his monumental biography of Abraham Lincoln, the first two volumes of which appeared in 1926 under the title Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and the final four volumes of which were published in 1939 as Abraham Lincoln: The War Years. The biography as a whole, which may have been occasionally inaccurate in detail but which was carefully researched and vividly written, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1940. Sandburg wrote other biographies, including Steichen the Photographer (1929) and Mary Lincoln: Wife and Widow (1932), as well as an autobiography, Always the Young Strangers (1953).

Continuing Success

As time passed, Sandburg's reputation flourished. His thousand-page novel Remembrance Rock appeared in 1948: he collected a brace of honorary degrees from universities and a handful of prizes, including the Swedish Order of the North Star in 1938, a Pulitzer Prize for poetry (1951), and a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. In 1962 he was designated poet laureate of Illinois. Together, these prizes recognized his ethnic roots, his regionalism, and above all his distinctively American voice—fitting tributes for a man who favored, as he wrote, "simple poems published long ago which continue to have an appeal for simple people."

Sources:

Harold Bloom, ed., Twentieth-century American Literature (New York: Chelsea House, 1987);

Dorothy Nyren Curley, Maurice Kramer, and Elaine Fialka Kramer, eds., Modern American Literature : A Library of Literary Criticism (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1969);

Penelope Niven, Carl Sandburg: A Biography (New York: Scribners, 1991).