446 Making It New: 1900–1945Populism and radicalism
Of those who did, contrary to Eberhart, think that a looser form and fierce, if not
frenetic belief were appropriate responses to a time of change and challenge none
were more committed than Carl Sandburg (1878–1967). The son of Swedish
immigrants, Sandburg left school at the age of 13. Traveling through the West and
taking a variety of jobs, he worked on a newspaper in Chicago, then as secretary to
the socialist mayor of Milwaukee, then returned to Chicago in 1913. There, one year
later, some of his poems were published in Poetry, the magazine founded and
edited by Harriet Monroe. Shortly after, Chicago Poems (1916) and Cornhuskers
(1918) established him as a major poet of the Midwest and Chicago Renaissance.
His poem “Chicago” (1916) announced the nature of his vision. “Hog Butcher for
the World / Tool Maker, Stacker of wheat, / ,” it began, “Stormy, husky, brawling, /
City of the Big Shoulders.” “I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city,”
Sandburg proudly declared, “... and say to them / Come and show me another city
with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.”
“Chicago,” like so many of Sandburg’s poems, is at once a description of the newly
emergent economic center of the Middle West and a celebration of the common
people, its inhabitants. Its direct, unanalytical populism is reflected in the style, in
which a rhetorical and flexible line, an idiomatic language and bold rhythms, all
become part of the attempt to create a poetic equivalent of folk speech. Chicago, in
turn, seems to be transformed into a folk hero, along the lines of Paul Bunyan or
Mike Fink; and at certain points the narrator seems something of a folk hero too,
responding to everything as he does with an equal feeling of wonder, a reverence for
its power and particularity. This is a simple poem, perhaps, but it is also a remarkable
one, because its celebration of the Middle West and America in general is a matter
not only of vision but of voice. It is a song both in praise and in imitation of American
energy, the sense of strength and possibility that an almost unlimited amount of
living space can bring.
Sandburg’s response to America was not uncritical, however. He could be hard,
when he turned from celebration of the innate energies of the people to an attack
on those who would suppress such energies or divert them to their own ends. In “A
Fence” (1916), for instance, the fence that a rich man builds around “his stone house
on the lake front” is identified with the barriers behind which he and his special
interests prefer to hide. Other poems, such as “New Feet” (1916) and “Gone” (1916),
suggest not so much the critical side of Sandburg, as a sadder, more ironic one, as he
captures the anonymity of urban life rather than (as in “Chicago”) its vitality. Nor
does Sandburg confine himself to the city scene; on the contrary, some of his finest
poems, like “Sunset from Omaha Hotel Window” (1918) and “More Country
People” (1918), are concerned with the signs, sounds, and the people of the prairies.
All of his work, though, whatever its subject, tone, or treatment, is shot through
with his democratic populist values; and none more so than two monumental
works, his biography of Abraham Lincoln begun in 1919 and not finished until
1939, and his reworking of folk song and idiom in The People, Yes, a long poem thatGGray_c04.indd 446ray_c 04 .indd 446 8 8/1/2011 7:53:59 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 59 AM