ANTI-WAR AND WAR POEMS

From the time he was a boy, Carl Sandburg was aware of anti-war sentiments. His father’s cousin had left Sweden to avoid military service and also refused to serve in the Union Army, for he “couldn’t take a hand in killing men.” Sandburg in his youth did not share this view; he was fascinated by the Civil War and its generals. When the Spanish-American War began, in 1898, he was working as an apprentice to a painter. Lured by the war propaganda, he joined Company C, Sixth Infantry Regiment of the Illinois Volunteers. He was, of course, also looking for travel and adventure. Instead, he found considerable misery.

During his college years Sandburg was introduced to Socialist ideas, and his radical views developed before the beginning of World War I. He had served as a Socialist organizer, and both he and his wife, Lilian, saw war as a folly promulgated by capitalists and national rulers. The earliest poems in this section, including “Buttons” and “Murmurings in a Field Hospital,” show Sandburg’s strong antiwar bias in the beginning years of the war. He was probably unable to publish some of his anti-war poems, such as “Planked Whitefish,” because of their brutal imagery and language.

When the United States entered the war in 1917, however, Sandburg and his wife broke with the anti-war Socialists. Sandburg later served as a war correspondent in Sweden, and he propagandized for the war in such poems as “The Four Brothers.” This poem, though immensely popular at the time, lacks the strong passion of his earlier anti-war poems.

With the rise of Fascism and Nazism during the 1930s, Sandburg’s sympathies were with the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War. His “Nearer Than Any Mother’s Heart Wishes,” written during this period, reflects his deep concern for the human tragedies of war, although it was not published in his lifetime.

During World War II Sandburg propagandized for the Allies in such poems as “Open Letter to the Poet Archibad MacLeish Who Has Forsaken His Massachusetts Farm to Make Propaganda for Freedom” and “The Man with the Broken Fingers.” Though still opposed to war, with its senseless and deadly violence, Sandburg felt he had no choice but to support the Allied effort against what he saw as the greater evil of the Nazis and Fascists.

In the final poem in this section, “Grass,” a work often anthologized, Sandburg, writing of the grass covering the graves of soldiers used as “cannon fodder,” shows his sympathy for those who fought and were killed as well as his knowledge of Nature’s relentlessness.

PORTRAITS

An acute observer of people around him and an avid student of history, Sandburg read Browning’s masterful poetic portraits when he was a student at Lombard College and was also influenced by Edgar Lee Masters’s word portraits in Spoon River Anthology. Moreover, Sandburg was a journalist interested in writing about people, and the poems in this section show his deftness at characterization.

These poetic portraits range from pieces on Philip Green Wright, a professor at Lombard College who was one of the major early influences on Sandburg’s life and art, to Napoleon, Eugene Debs, Amy Lowell, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Milton, Ezra Pound, Charlie Chaplin, and the Sandburg dog Dan. These vivid character studies, written in simple language, attempt to get to the essence of the person (or dog) being written about.