Word: sandburg
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Along with its music and anecdotal flow, his verse had the Whitmanesque "barbaric yawp," as in "Chicago" ("Hog butcher of the world"). Sandburg could also lilt a form of American haiku...
...Sandburg, the head of the family was Abraham Lincoln, who embodied the qualities that the poet so greatly admired, and in some measure possessed: honesty, wit, an unpretentious and even awkward eloquence. For 15 years, Sandburg labored on his monumental six-volume biography of Lincoln. He won a Pulitzer prize for the Lincoln books in 1940, another for his Collected Poems...
...Wigglings." For all the popularity of his works, Sandburg never fared well in academe. Critic Edmund Wilson observed of the Lincoln biography: "There are moments when one is tempted to feel that the crudest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth was to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg." A kind of pseudo-folksy affectation came into some of Sandburg's work. Such criticism never troubled the poet. He was an old-fashioned storyteller, and when an interviewer once mentioned modern poetry, Sandburg snorted: "I say to hell with the new poetry. Sometimes...
...Sandburg grew up in Galesburg, Ill., where his Swedish father was a railroad worker. He quit school at 13, hopped a westbound freight at 17 to see the land he was to celebrate. Later Galesburg's Lombard College accepted him on the basis of a special qualifying examination. After studying there for nearly four years, he hoboed in the East, then became a newspaper reporter, a vocation he pursued on and off as a correspondent and columnist for Chicago dailies until...
...Harriet Monroe's Poetry magazine published "Chicago," and Sandburg was recognized...