FREE ESSAY ON CARL SANDBURG

CARL SANDBURG

Craig Collins
Per. 2
Eng. 11
As a child of an immigrant couple, Carl Sandburg was barely American himself, yet the
life, which he had lived, has defined key aspects of our great country, and touched the
hearts and minds of her people. Sandburg grew up in the American Midwest, yet spent the
majority of his life traveling throughout the states. The country, which would define his
style of poetry and his views of society, government, and culture, would equally be
defined by his writing, lecturing, and the American dream he lived: The dream of becoming
successful with only an idea and the will to use it. Historically, Sandburg's most
defining poetic element is his free verse style. His open views towards American
democracy, labor, and war earned him great respect, and even greater criticism. He was
considered one of America's finest poets during his lifetime; moreover, he is now
renowned as one of America's greatest poets of all time (Niven 388-406).
August, his father, on a typical hard labor job expected from an immigrant male raising a
family in the early nineteen hundreds. Odd jobs helped Carl support his family when he
was forced to work at the young age of thirteen. Although raised poor, Carl aspired to
travel the country and it's cities. He accomplished this goal with great help from the
American rail system (Niven 388-392).
Sandburg went on to become a great and successful writer for several newspapers as well
as author to many books of poetry. After brief political success, Carl left office to
write for Milwaukee's paper, The Social Democratic Herald in 1911. Then, just a few years
later, Sandburg starts work at the Chicago Daily News(Niven 392-393).
After a friend, Alfred Harcourt, risked his job to get Sandburg published for the first
time, Sandburg's career took off. Even despite massive criticism based only on his
political views, Sandburg sold thousands of books and became highly acclaimed (Lowell,
3012-3014).
On January 12, 1920, Untemeyer, a writer for New York's New Republic claims that Sandburg
is one of the two greatest living poets of the times (Macleigh 3018). 
Sandburg wrote a landmark six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln. A consummate platform
performer, he roamed the United States for nearly a half century, guitar in hand,
collecting and singing American folk songs. For his own children and children everywhere
he wrote Rootabaga Stories, and Rootabaga Pigeons, some of the first authentic American
fairy tales. He was a journalist by trade; his newspaper reportage and commentary
documented labor, racial, and economic strife and other key events of his times. But Carl
Sandburg was first and foremost a poet, writing poems about America in the American idiom
for the American people. The titles of his volumes of poetry testify to his major themes:
Chicago Poems, Cornhuskers, Smoke and Steel, Good Morning, America, The People, Yes.
(Niven 399-400)
Sandburg's vision of the American experience was shaped in the American Midwest during
the complicated events that brought the nineteenth century to a close. His parents were
Swedish immigrants who met in Illinois, where they had settled in search of a share of
American democracy and prosperity (Macleigh, 3016-3018). 
August Sandburg helped to build the first cross-continental railroad, and in the
twentieth century his son Carl was an honored guest on the first cross-continental jet
flight. August Sandburg was a blacksmith's helper for the Chicago Burlington and Quincy
Railroad in Galesburg, Illinois, when his son was born on 6 January 1878 in a small
cottage a few steps away from the roundhouse and railroad yards. Carl August Sandburg was
the second child first son of the hardworking Sandburgs. He grew up speaking Swedish and
English, and, eager to be assimilated into American society, he Americanized his name. In
1884 or 1885, somewhere in the first year or two of school, he began to call himself
Charles rather than the Swedish Carl because he had said the name Carl would mean one
more Poor Swede Boy while the name Charles filled the mouth and had 'em guessing" (Niven
401-405) 
There were seven children in the Sandburg family, and the two youngest sons died of
diphtheria on the same day in 1892. Charles Sandburg had to leave school at age thirteen
to work at a variety of odd jobs to supplement the family income. As a teenager he was
restless and impulsive, hungry for experience in the world beyond the staid, introverted
prairie town, which had always been his. At age eighteen, he borrowed his father's
railroad pass and had his first look at Chicago, the city of his destiny. In 1897
Sandburg joined the corps of more than 60,000 hoboes who found the American railroads an
exhilarating if illicit free ride from one corner of the United States to another. For
three and a half months of his nineteenth year he traveled through Iowa, Missouri,
Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado, working on farms, steamboats, and railroads, blacking
stoves, washing dishes, and listening to the American vernacular, the idiom that would
permeate his poetry (Niven 404-405). 
The journey left Sandburg with a permanent wanderlust. He volunteered for the
Spanish-American War in 1898 and served in Puerto Rico from until late August. As a
veteran, he received free tuition for a year at Lombard College in Galesburg and enrolled
there in October 1898. He was offered a conditional appointment to the U.S. Military
Academy at West Point, New York, on the basis of his Spanish-American War service, but in
June 1899 failed entrance examinations in arithmetic and grammar. He returned to Lombard,
where he studied until May of 1902, when he left college without enough credits for
graduation (Niven, 398-400). 
From 1910 until 1912 Carl and Paula Sandburg lived in Milwaukee, where Sandburg was
instrumental in the Milwaukee Socialists' unprecedented political in 1910. When Emil
Seidel was elected Milwaukee's first Socialist mayor in that year, Sandburg, then
thirty-two, was appointed his secretary. Sandburg left city hall in 1911 to write for
Victor Berger's Social Democratic Herald in Milwaukee. In June 1911 the Sandburg's first
child, Margaret, was born. A daughter died at birth in 1913; Janet was born in 1916, and
Helga was born in 1918. In 1912 the Sandburgs moved to Chicago, where Sandburg joined the
staff of the Socialist Chicago Evening World, which had expanded in the wake of a
pressman's strike that closed most other Chicago newspapers. Once the strike was settled,
the World went out of business, and Sandburg work with small periodicals such as the
business magazine System and Day Book, an addles daily newspaper owned by W.E. Scripps.
He contributed occasional articles to the International Socialist Review, often using the
Jack Phillips. Sandburg struggled to find an outlet for his poetry and enough income to
support his young family. His fortunes turned in 1914 when Harriet Monroe of Poetry
published six of his radical, muscular poems in the March issue of her forward-looking
journal. This first significant recognition of his work brought him into the Chicago
literary circle (Lowell, 3013-3015)
Carl Sandburg found his subject in the American people and the American landscape; he
found his voice, after a long, lonely search and struggle, in the vivid, candid economy
of the American vernacular. (Niven 406)
He worked his way to an individual free-verse style, which spoke clearly, directly, and
often crudely to the audience which was also his subject. His poetry celebrated and
consoled people in their environments--the crush of the city, the enduring solace the
prairie. In his work for the Day Book, the Chicago Daily News, and the Newspaper
Enterprise Association (NEA), Sandburg had become a skilled investigative reporter with
passionate social concerns. He covered war, racial, lynching, mob violence, and the
inequities of the industrial society, such as child labor, and disease and injury induced
in the workplace. These concerns were transmuted into poetry. Chicago Poems offered bold,
realistic portraits of working men, women, and children; of the inexplicable fate of the
vulnerable struggling human victims of war, progress, and business. Great men, pageants
of war and labor, soldiers and workers, mothers lifting their children--these all I, and
felt the solemn thrill of them, Sandburg wrote in Masses. (Sherwood, 3022-3024)
Sandburg's themes in Chicago Poems reflect his Socialistic idealism and pragmatism, but
they also contain a wider humanism, a profound affirmation of common man, the common
destiny, the common tragedies and joys of life. Just as Sandburg's subject matter
transcended that of conventional poetry, his free verse form was unique, original, and
controversial. Some critics found his forms shapeless and questioned whether Sandburg's
work was poetry at all. (Sherwood, 3022) Sandburg transmuted the harsh reality of his
times into poetry, and the emerging volume, Smoke and Steel (1920), was dedicated to his
brother-in-law, Edward Steichen. As in preceding volumes, Sandburg vividly depicts the
daily toil of the workingman and woman, the people who must sing or die. The smoke of
spring fields, autumn leaves, steel mills, and battleship is the emblem and extension of
the blood of a man, the life force which under girds the industrial society and the
larger human brotherhood: Deep down are the cinders we came from--/ You and I and our
heads of smoke, he wrote in the title poem. Sandburg's American landscape broadens in
Smoke and Steel from Chicago and the prairie to specific scenes in places such as Gary,
Indiana; Omaha; Cleveland; Kalamazoo; Far Rockaway; the Blue Ridge; New York. In all of
these places Sandburg found a common theme, the struggle of the common man, the quest of
the finders in the dark. I hear America, I hear, what do I hear? he wrote in The Sins of
Kalamazoo. (Lowell 3012-3014)
Throughout his life, Carl Sandburg influenced the lives of many Americans. He didn't just
define American poetry; he defined America through his views on the world's culture and
society. Although growing up as a child of immigrants, Carl was very successful and
proved that the ever-present American Dream can happen and has happened before. The
poetry that made him famous was unique and original on its own, yet this did not make him
an American influence. His views on politics were different than most people's views, yet
his beliefs and his understanding of the democratic system allowed him to express his
doubts and express his concerns for the American people. This allowed others to take an
honest look at the American way of life and it's flaws. Sandburg was, put simply, An
American Influence.