As many as skies in delicate change

Of cloud and blue and flimmering sun.

Yet,

You may not come, O girl of a dream,

We may but pass as the world goes by

And take from a look of eyes into eyes,

A film of hope and a memoried day.

Lilian responded, on February 15, 1908: “Your Dream Girl . . . is indeed a dream girl—not of our world to-day but of the Millennial Epoch of Rest. In our Epoch of Struggle girls must be made of sterner stuff.” She continued, “So while I have no praise for the Dream Girl itself (from the standpoint of democratic art)—yet I have plenty of appreciation for the intelligence that created it—for the powers for good in that intelligence when employed in socialist propaganda!” Lilian Steichen was a brilliant woman and a major influence in improving Sandburg’s poetry; indeed, many of the poems in his early volumes owe much of their power to her careful work as his major artistic critic.

After he met Lilian, whom he called Paula, Sandburg’s love poetry took on a dramatic intensity. He wrote clearly and lovingly about her and their children, Margaret, Janet, and Helga.

Sandburg wrote other love poems of great passion, poems he did not attempt to publish. Some of these—“In Blue Gown and In Black Satin Gown,” “She Held Herself a Deep Pool for Him,” “An Interwoven Man and Woman Talked,” “Troth Tryst,” and “Hellcat”—remained unpublished until 1993. Just why Sandburg chose not to publish them in his lifetime is unknown. Perhaps he thought them too passionate, exposing an inner self he wished to keep hidden.

“Bilbea,” the final love poem here, is in a class all to itself. As Sandburg explained in The World of Carl Sandburg: “In some old National Geographic Magazine there was an interpretation of Babylonian hieroglyphics of this vintage, by a responsible interpreter, and it said practically the idea expressed in this poem.” Again, we do not know what drew Sandburg to this love poem from a Babylonian tablet, but we may speculate that it was its theme, the universality of love.

LINCOLN

By the early 1920s Sandburg was thinking of writing a biography of Lincoln. He wanted to break down all the sentimentalizing about the man he had long admired. Even before he began the biography he wrote a number of poems about Lincoln, and he continued to do so throughout his career. The first part of this section contains those Lincoln poems that Sandburg chose to publish during his lifetime. At the time of his death he had other Lincoln poems in his files, and five of them, arranged together, conclude this section. Three of these have never before appeared in print.

In “Fire-Logs,” published in 1918, Sandburg wrote imaginatively about Lincoln’s mother, who was thought to have been illegitimate. He presents her as a dreamer, just as her famous son was known to be. In the 1916 poem “In a Back Alley” Lincoln appears as the face on the penny, the lowest denomination of coins, the common currency of the people, which newsboys are carelessly pitching for idle amusement. “Knucks,” published in 1918, is a startling image of contrast between the businessman in Lincoln’s home town who sells iron knuckles for fighting and Lincoln, whose message is “malice to none.”