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A public favorite, Sandburg began touring the country giving readings and lectures, and he wrote in a variety of genres, publishing children’s books, articles, the aforementioned biographies and an autobiography, as well as his poetry. But his poetic colleagues, such as Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams, considered Sandburg a poet with little craft. To an extent, they were right. Sandburg was more interested in subject matter than form or meter, and his poems often seem less polished. Despite what his contemporaries thought, Sandburg enjoyed wide public acclaim throughout his career. The governor of Illinois honored him by celebrating his seventy-fifth birthday as “Carl Sandburg Day,” the king of Sweden recognized him, the U.S. Congress invited him to give an address, schools were named after him in his home state, and President Johnson bestowed on him the Medal of Freedom in 1964.
Deeply influenced by Walt Whitman, Sandburg shared his predecessor’s devotion to American subject matter and common life. Sandburg strove to give poetic voice to a country whose poets seemed too willing to take a back seat to European tradition and to emulate Continental and other borrowed voices and forms. Based in Chicago, Sandburg was part of a school of poets who tried to wrest American poetry from the literary elite. Sandburg’s poetry was ultimately more political than either Whitman’s or William Carlos Williams’s, and his sharp journalistic eye made a frequent appearance in his verse. A political socialist, Sandburg saw his poetry as rooted in the vernacular and the experiences of the working class.
[4501] Anonymous, Chicago, Looking North from State and Washington Streets (1930),
courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration.
Some of Carl Sandburg’s best-known poems are about his home city, Chicago. Sandburg was at the vanguard of a literary movement that sought to bring poetry to the working class.
[4848] Jack Delano, Blue Island, Illinois. Switching a Train with Diesel Switch Engine on the Chicago and Rock Island Railroad (1943),
courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USW3-026606-E DLC].
The Chicago and Rock Island Rail Road Company was an important line that began operation in 1848. The 1930s saw the rise of a much lighter diesel engine that brought great innovations in both freight trains and stream-lined “lightweight” passenger trains. Trains would come to symbolize both the hopefulness of modernism and the horrors of World War II.
[6551] Kenyon Cox, Columbia & Cuba–Magazine Cover–Nude Study (1898),
courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-68463].
An allegorical cover of an 1898 magazine, exemplifying the openness toward the human body of the late-nineteenth-century realists. The names of the women, “Columbia” and “Cuba,” refer to the imagined relationship of the nations during the Spanish American War.
[7110] H. C. White Co., Making Link Sausages–Machines Stuff 10 Ft. per Second (c. 1905),
courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USZ62-50217].
Photograph of Swift and Company’s Chicago packing house. Mechanization and urbanization encouraged some writers’ nostalgia for the United States’s agricultural past.
[8000] Al Ravenna, Carl Sandburg, Head-and-Shoulders Portrait, Facing Left (1955),
courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USZ62-115064].
Like William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg was deeply influenced by Walt Whitman. He shared Whitman’s love of common things and his devotion to Abraham Lincoln and American themes.