IMAGES

Early in his Chicago days Sandburg had become aware of the Imagists. He admired Emily Dickinson’s poetry; he corresponded with Ezra Pound (then touting the Imagist movement); and he befriended and carried on an extended correspondence with Amy Lowell, one of the most prominent of the Imagists. Sandburg was never a member of that coterie, but he did write poems using Imagist techniques as defined by Harriet Monroe, the editor of Poetry magazine: the elimination of “every unnecessary word, every unstructural ornament” and the use of concrete images. His best known of these poems, “Fog,” was what he called a “free-going, independent American Hoku” [haiku].

Sandburg, with his strong social conscience, at times turned from “pure” images, in poems such as “Fog,” to those with a realistic social context. In “Painted Fishes,” for example, the beautiful green fishes on a red-lacquered tray, with the paint wearing away from their fins, are placed in a saloon setting. No stranger to saloons, Sandburg creates a beautiful picture out of the sawdust-floored, raucous world of bars.

With Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and other Imagists, Sandburg shared an interest in Asian poetry and paintings. At Amy Lowell’s home in Massachusetts he met the translator Florence Ayscough. Enthusiastic about her Chinese translations, he transformed some of them into free verse. In “These Valleys Seem Old” he combined Imagism and social criticism. When he later wrote Amy Lowell about permission to print these poems, she responded, in September of 1919, that while Ayscough thought the poems were beautiful, she did not find the renderings exact and would therefore not grant permission. The four poems in “These Valleys Seem Old,” inexact renditions though they may be, are as beautiful as the scenes on Chinese scroll paintings. Because of Ayscough’s objections, however, they remained unpublished until 1993, when they appeared in Billy Sunday and Other Poems.

Sandburg published the “pure” image poems during his lifetime, but most of those with a social context were published posthumously. He may have withheld the latter poems because of Amy Lowell’s objections to what she considered “propaganda” in his early poetry. Though Sandburg chose not to publish some of these poems, they are fully as strong as the “pure” ones and are certainly worthy of serious study.

POEMS OF PROTEST

This section contains some of Sandburg’s strongest poems of protest, many of which were published after his death. The first of these, “Billy Sunday,” appeared in an expurgated form in Chicago Poems under the title “To a Contemporary Bunkshooter.” The original version played a key role in the publication of this first volume of Sandburg’s poetry. In January of 1916 Sandburg sent the manuscript of Chicago Poems to Alfred Harcourt, then a young editor at Henry Holt. Harcourt was impressed with the poetry and wanted to publish it, but he knew there would be difficulty in getting some of the text approved by senior members of the publishing firm. He wrote Sandburg: “For obvious reasons, we think the poems, the subjects of which are living people referred to by name, should certainly be omitted. Some of the poems are a little too ‘raw’.” Sandburg wanted all of his poems published, and he made changes to ensure that they were acceptable. The Billy Sunday poem was retitled, the evangelist Sunday was no longer referred to by name, and language thought to be offensive was removed. Sandburg wrote Harcourt, on February 4, 1916, that the revisions should make it acceptable “to all but the most hidebound and creed-drilled religionists.” With Sandburg’s revisions, it did appear in Chicago Poems. Sandburg was portraying a popular religious figure he considered a pious fraud, and it is not surprising that the original “Billy Sunday,” included here, is much more powerful and provocative than the expurgated version in Chicago Poems.