POETRY DEFINITIONS

In his famous definition of Metaphysical poetry Dr. Samuel Johnson spoke of “heterogeneous ideas” being “yoked by violence together.” Sandburg was not, of course, a Metaphysical poet, but in the thirty-eight definitions of poetry found in this section he does yoke disparate ideas together, sometimes violently, in order to suggest some of the mystery of poetry.

Writing about these “Tentative (First Model) Definitions of Poetry” in his critical study Carl Sandburg, Richard Crowder says that Sandburg “used imagery of all sorts to explain this paradoxical entwining of available material and the ultimately inexpressible. The best known of these thrusts into the dark called poetry is a combination of ‘hyacinths and biscuits,’ dreams and flowers, yes, but practicalities and words, too. Language is frightening and awesome in its flexibility, connotations, and emotional impact, but it is the material substance (‘biscuits’) which a poet must use to try to communicate the ineffable (‘hyacinths’).”

Sandburg would undoubtedly have rejected Crowder’s analysis—and, indeed, would probably have rejected all formal analyses of his poetry—preferring instead the informal interpretations of individual readers. He wanted his definitions to reflect the mystery of poetry. Sandburg believed “what can be explained is not poetry.”

“All my life,” Sandburg wrote in the last paragraph of his “Notes for a Preface” to his Complete Poems, “I have been trying to learn to read, to see and hear, and to write.” He says he had over many decades “written by different methods and in a wide miscellany of moods” and still he favored “simple poems . . . which continue to have an appeal for simple people.”

A Note on the Text

The texts of the poems are as published in The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg, Breathing Tokens, Billy Sunday and Other Poems, and The World of Carl Sandburg. Except in one case, all the ellipses are Sandburg’s; this exception has been noted by the use of square brackets.

The previously unpublished poems about Lincoln were transcribed from manuscripts in the Sandburg Collection in the Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Chicago

Here is the difference between Dante, Milton and me. They wrote about hell and never saw the place. I wrote about Chicago after looking the town over for years and years.

— CARL SANDBURG, from Carl Sandburg: A Pictorial Biography

I admit there is some animus of violence in Chicago Poems but the aim was rather the presentation of motives and character than the furtherance of I.W.W. theories. Of course, I honestly prefer the theories of the I.W.W. to those of its opponents and some of my honest preferences may have crept into the book, as you suggest, but the aim was to sing, blab, chortle, yodel, like people, and people in the sense of human beings subtracted from formal doctrines.

— CARL SANDBURG, from a letter to Amy Lowell, circa June 1917

Chicago

Hog Butcher for the World,

Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,

Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;

Stormy, husky, brawling,