Selected Poems

Publisher’s Note

Rendering poetry in a digital format presents several challenges, just as its many forms continue to challenge the conventions of print. In print, however, a poem takes place within the static confines of a page, hewing as close as possible to the poet’s intent, whether it’s Walt Whitman’s lines stretching to the margin like Route 66, or Robert Creeley’s lines descending the page like a string tie. The printed poem has a physical shape, one defined by the negative space that surrounds it—a space that is crafted by the broken lines of the poem. The line, as vital a formal and critical component of the form of a poem as metaphor, creates rhythm, timing, proportion, drama, meaning, tension, and so on.

Reading poetry on a small device will not always deliver line breaks as the poet intended—with the pressure the horizontal line brings to a poem, rather than the completion of the grammatical unit. The line, intended as a formal and critical component of the form of the poem, has been corrupted by breaking it where it was not meant to break, interrupting a number of important elements of the poetic structure—rhythm, timing, proportion, drama, meaning, and so on. It’s a little like a tightrope walker running out of rope before reaching the other side.

There are limits to what can be done with long lines on digital screens. At some point, a line must break. If it has to break more than once or twice, it is no longer a poetic line, with the integrity that lineation demands. On smaller devices with enlarged type, a line break may not appear where its author intended, interrupting the unit of the line and its importance in the poem’s structure.

We attempt to accommodate long lines with a hanging indent—similar in fashion to the way Whitman’s lines were treated in books whose margins could not honor his discursive length. On your screen, a long line will break according to the space available, with the remainder of the line wrapping at an indent. This allows readers to retain control over the appearance of text on any device, while also indicating where the author intended the line to break.

This may not be a perfect solution, as some readers initially may be confused. We have to accept, however, that we are creating poetry e-books in a world that is imperfect for them—and we understand that to some degree the line may be compromised. Despite this, we’ve attempted to protect the integrity of the line, thus allowing readers of poetry to travel fully stocked with the poetry that needs to be with them.

—Ecco

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Publisher’s Note

Introduction

A Note on the Text

Chicago

Chicago

Halsted Street Car

The Workingmen

Fish Crier

Muckers

Mill-Doors

Mag

Onion Days

Dynamiter

Mamie

Working Girls

Trafficker

Harrison Street Court

Gone

Soiled Dove

Old Woman

Washerwoman

Gypsy Mother

Implications

Graceland

Skyscraper

The People, Yes, No. 81

The Windy City

Images

Fog

Sketch

Lost

Flux

Nocturne in a Deserted Brickyard

Window

Sunset from Omaha Hotel Window

Prairie Waters by Night

Bee Song

Bumble Bee Days

Jan Kubelik

Chinese Letters or Korean

Painted Fishes

These Valleys Seem Old

Three Pieces on the Smoke of Autumn

Poems of Protest

Billy Sunday

The Eastland

Anna Imroth

The Hammer

Child of the Romans

Southern Pacific

’Boes

Taking on Suds Men Talk

Glimmer

Jerry

Horses and Men in Rain

Hoodlums

The Mayor of Gary

Blacklisted

The Machine

Legal Midnight Hour

Love Poems

Paula

White Shoulders

June

Poppies

Margaret

Baby Toes

Helga

Spanish

You and a Sickle Moon

In Blue Gown and in Black Satin Gown

She Held Herself a Deep Pool for Him

An Interwoven Man and Woman Talked

Troth Tryst

Offering and Rebuff

Hellcat

Bilbea

Lincoln

Fire-Logs

In a Back Alley

Knucks

The People, Yes, No. 57

The Long Shadow of Lincoln: A Litany

Abraham Lincoln’s Father and Mother*

Lincoln*

Mr. Lincoln and His Gloves*

Journey and Oath*

Untitled*

Anti-War and War Poems

House

Old Timers

Ready to Kill

Killers

Planked Whitefish

Murmurings in a Field Hospital

Buttons

Salvage

Wars

A Million Young Workmen, 1915

In the Shadow of the Palace

The Four Brothers

Nearer Than Any Mother’s Heart Wishes

Open Letter to the Poet Archibald MacLeish Who Has Forsaken His Massachusetts Farm to Make Propaganda for Freedom

The Man with the Broken Fingers

Forgotten Wars

Grass

Portraits

To a Poet

Memoir of a Proud Boy

Napoleon

Hawthorne

Mr. Blake’s Chariots

Evidence As to a She Devil

Arms

Eugene V. Debs

Ezra

Good Babies Make Good Poems

From an Illinois Prairie Hut

Letters to Dead Imagists

Illinois Farmer

Osawatomie

Grieg Being Dead

Sherwood Anderson

Jack London and O. Henry

Without the Cane and the Derby

To the Ghost of John Milton

Mysterious Biography

Mr. Longfellow and His Boy

Dan

African-Americans

Jazz Fantasia

Sojourner Truth Speaking

The People, Yes, No. 55

Cleo

Black Prophetess

Elizabeth Umpstead

Sayings of Henry Stephens

Nigger

Man, the Man-Hunter

Poet of the People

I Am the People, the Mob

A Reporter in Debt

My People

Poems Done on a Late Night Car

Prairie

Cartoon

Smoke and Steel

The Lawyers Know Too Much

The Liars

Threes

Red-Headed Restaurant Cashier

Lines Written for Gene Kelly to Dance To

Slabs of the Sunburnt West

A Couple

The People, Yes, Nos. 1, 4, 20, 37, 58, 78, 107

Timesweep

Musings

Chicago Poet

Phizzog

Wilderness

Broken-Face Gargoyles

Aprons of Silence

The Road and the End

Style

Potato Blossom Songs and Jigs

Cool Tombs

Old Osawatomie

Hats

Accomplished Facts

Buffalo Dusk

The Abracadabra Boys

Our Hells

Moonlight and Maggots

Biography

Breathing Tokens

Monday, One P.M.

Government

I Should Like to Be Hanged on a Summer Afternoon

Poetry Definitions

Tentative (First Model) Definitions of Poetry

Acknowledgments

Original Publication Sources

Selected Bibliography

Index of Titles and First Lines

About the Editors

The Works of Carl Sandburg

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

Carl Sandburg came to widespread public attention with the publication of his poem “Chicago” in Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine in 1914. The opening lines are a vivid picture of the city as Sandburg saw it:

Hog Butcher for the World,

Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,

Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;

Stormy, husky, brawling,

City of the Big Shoulders.

The poem immediately “roused a storm of protest,” one observer said. Many Chicagoans, as well as conservative readers everywhere, objected to Sandburg’s brutal imagery, while other critics derided as unaesthetic his use of free verse. Nevertheless, two years later, when he published his first book-length volume, Chicago Poems, he used “Chicago” as the title poem. The poems in that book came from Sandburg’s working-class background, his intimate knowledge of urban life based on his years as a journalist, his Socialist views, his belief in social and economic justice, and his faith in the people, “the mob.”

Critical approaches to Sandburg’s work were established early on. William Braithwaite, writing in the Boston Transcript, called Chicago Poems a “book of ill-regulated speech that has neither verse or proper rhythms.” Amy Lowell objected to propagandistic elements in some of the poems but praised the originality of the book. W. A. Bradley, in the Dial, called Sandburg a “rather gross, simple-minded, sentimental” poet who was also a “highly sensitized impressionist who finds in the subtle accords between his own ideal moods and the loveliest, most elusive aspects of the external world, material for delicate and dreamlike expression.”

Sandburg’s early radicalism was tempered in the decades following the publication of Chicago Poems, and by the 1930s his poetry had lost some of its social sting. However, Sandburg himself never lost his social conscience or his Whitmanesque belief in the people, the American mob. After completing his six-volume biography of Lincoln in 1939, Sandburg became a cultural icon. He made appearances across the country reading his poetry and singing folk songs. While his racy and colloquial language never appealed to the academy, his poetry spoke to the masses and was accessible to all who could read. As Archibald MacLeish described it, “There is [in Sandburg’s writing] . . . a tang, a liveliness, a pungency which is native and natural to the American ear.”

Part of Sandburg’s popularity can be attributed to his use of free verse. As he explained in The Sandburg Treasury:

We have heard much in our time about free verse being modern, as though it is a new-found style for men to use in speaking and writing, rising out of the machine age, skyscrapers, high speed and jazz. Now, if free verse is a form of writing poetry without rhyme, without regular meters, without established and formal rules governing it, we can easily go back to the earliest styles of poetry known to the human family—and the style is strictly free verse. Before men invented the alphabet, so that poems could be put down in writing, they spoke their poems. When one man spoke to another in a certain timebeat and rhythm, if it happened that his words conveyed certain impressions and moods to his listeners, he was delivering poetry to them, whether he knew it or they knew it, and whether he or they had a name for an art which the poet was practicing on himself and them.

This one-volume edition of Sandburg’s best and most characteristic poetry is designed for general readers and for students. The poems span Sandburg’s forty-year career and are drawn from four volumes: The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg, published in 1970; Breathing Tokens, edited after Sandburg’s death by his eldest daughter, Margaret Sandburg, in 1978; Billy Sunday and Other Poems, edited by George and Willene Hendrick in 1993; and The World of Carl Sandburg, by Norman Corwin, published in 1961. The poems are grouped by subject under eleven headings and are arranged within each section in roughly—though not slavishly—chronological order. Even if one wished to present the poems in strict chronological order, it would not be possible, for Sandburg rarely dated his poems. He tended to put them aside after they were written and would later dip into his kit bag to complete sections of whatever book he was preparing for publication at the time. At the end of this volume we list the original source of book publication of each poem in the anthology.

CHICAGO

Born to immigrant Swedish parents in the prairie town of Galesburg, Illinois, in 1876, Sandburg did not see Chicago until he was eighteen. As a boy, though, he had delivered and read Chicago newspapers, and the midwestern metropolis fascinated and lured him. When his father secured a railroad pass for his son, who was then taking one dead-end job after another, Sandburg finally got a taste of the big city. He wrote about that first visit in Always the Young Strangers. Sandburg’s Socialist friend John Sjodin, who had lived in Chicago, told him how to live cheaply in the city by the big lake. And live cheaply he did. In his three days there, he spent twenty-five cents a night for a room in a flophouse, five cents for breakfast, and ten cents each for lunch and dinner. He went to a variety show two nights, but mostly he walked and observed city life: “I . . . never got tired of the roar of the streets, the trolley cars, the teamsters, the drays, buggies, surries, and phaetons, the delivery wagons high with boxes, the brewery wagons piled with barrels. . . .” On his last day in Chicago, he went into a saloon for the free lunch there, paid his five cents for a beer, and while he was “feeding his face” he was approached by a prostitute, who asked him, “Looking fer a good time?” After an exchange of words, Sandburg finally told her, “You’re up the wrong alley, sister. I ain’t got but two nickels and they wouldn’t do you any good.” He saw Chicago for one dollar and fifty cents, and much of what he saw would later be reflected time after time in his poetry about the Windy City.

In 1912 Sandburg moved to Chicago and grew to know intimately the places he described in Chicago Poems. He worked as a newspaper reporter, haunting Chicago’s streets, cafés, and saloons and venturing into the world of prostitutes, working men and women, bums, and radicals. His memorable poem “Chicago” grew out of his overview of the city and its citizens. As his knowledge of “his” Chicago deepened, he wrote such poems as “The Windy City” and “The People, Yes,” No. 81, which, though never as widely read as “Chicago,” reflect Sandburg’s special insights and deserve careful reading. The first section in this anthology brings together his best known and less well known poems about Chicago.

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.