These poems show in vivid detail a Sandburg far ahead of his time in his passionate concern for the plight of individual African-Americans and for race relations overall throughout the United States.

POET OF THE PEOPLE

In her biography of Sandburg, Penelope Niven wrote that with the publication of Chicago Poems a “wide audience was beginning to listen” to Sandburg. “He offended many,” she noted, “but the poems spoke in new ways to readers who still equated rhyme and romanticism with poetry.” Sandburg used free verse and wrote realistically about the world he saw, but in the years following Chicago Poems he offended fewer and fewer people. His radicalism was less pronounced, and he identified more and more with the people, the mob. Over decades, he took his poetry and his music directly to the people through countless appearances across the country. In the minds of most Americans, he was finally seen as a character and an entertainer—certainly not as a dangerous radical.

The poems in this section are diverse in form, content, and length, but throughout there is a spirit of “the people, yes,” a phrase Sandburg eventually used as the title of one of his most characteristic volumes of poetry. In his resounding “Yes” he showed his deep indebtedness to Whitman, whose “Song of Myself” begins:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

Sandburg was no less egotistical than Whitman: he believed that the people would assume what he assumed. Like Whitman, he sang himself and the people, and in his best poems they became one. “I am the people, the mob,” he would chant, and he would join the mob in the cities and in the country, in their happiness, sadness, and tragedies. His concern eventually was for the family of man, and he became in “Timesweep” a part of everything that had ever existed:

There is only one Maker in the world

and His children cover the earth

and they are named All God’s Children.

MUSINGS

Sandburg the dreamer often wrote down his poetic musings; some of the most interesting and provocative of these are presented here. While Sandburg was at times gregarious, he was also introspective, given to dreams and speculations. Imagine the poet sitting by his window at the newspaper office or in his study at home, lost in thought, musing about himself his world, about poetry and art, about the human condition. The poems that spring from these quiet moments are sometimes comic, sometimes sardonic, sometimes serious. In “Chicago Poet” he looked in the mirror and “saluted a nobody.” In “Wilderness” he was animalistic and also a singer of songs. In “I Should Like to Be Hanged on a Summer Afternoon” he imagined his own death. He gave academic critics (most of whom scorned him) their due in “The Abracadabra Boys.” As always, Sandburg wanted his musings, even the personal ones, to be understood by his readers, who he assumed had dreams and musings that were similar to his own.