Word: sandburg
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COMPLETE POEMS (676 pp.) - Carl Sandburg-Harcourt, Brace...
...Carl Sandburg did pretty well at West Point-for a poet. He lasted two weeks.* He failed in arithmetic and grammar and now, 50 years later, in the preface to his fat Complete Poems he admits that he is "still studying verbs and the mystery of how they connect nouns," and adds, "I am more suspicious of adjectives than at any other time in all my born days." On the subject of poetic form, form-scorning Poet Sandburg is a more primitive, less useful guide. Example...
Complete Poems is one of the most massive monuments to uninhibited formlessness in all literature.The quality marks the first poem on the first page, Sandburg's famous Chicago, published...
...major U.S. literary figures, Sandburg, during a long productive life, has developed least as a writer, changed least as a man. His poetry, dredged raw from the look and experience of "the people," is from start to finish a shrewd, tender, cantankerous and lovingly slangy impressionist folk-portrait. Even his monumental biography, Abraham Lincoln, ungainly and near-noble, is a research-buttressed prose poem to a people's hero and many of its cadenced passages are as good poetry as Sandburg has ever written. Most modern poets use a language so private that it divorces them from...
...Sandburg's love for the people is as genuine as his love for nickel stogies, but it never attains poetic passion and it is shrouded in pessimism more often than it is clothed in hope. At best he sees a murky, half-formed potential...