Word: sandburg
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THIS month two aging American bards, alumni of neighboring Illinois colleges, took up their ruggedly-strung lyres again: Carl Sandburg, 58, Lombard College '02, with The People, Yes; Edgar Lee Masters, 67, Knox College, with Poems of the People...
...entered the White House with Jackson, where "they all drank cider." The People, Yes is a 286-page volume in which no such signs of aloofness are apparent. As Sandburg's most ambitious poetic venture, it has little in common with the fragmentary, glancing, impressionist verses that won him his reputation, stands superior to them in originality and wit. One of the chief critical charges brought against Sandburg has been that he lacked an integrated philosophy that would guide his writing, that his poems have too frequently been mere expressions of moods, descriptions of street and industrial scenes, echoes...
...Some pretty good men are on the street." . . . "You can't convict a million dollars." Sometimes Sandburg brings in more conventional proverbs to contrast with nuggets of contemporary wisdom. Sometimes he merely lists ordinary, everyday greetings to suggest the breezy friendliness of his hero: Where you been so long? What good wind blew you in? These themes are interspaced with examples of native folklore that range from Ford jokes to the classic rural replies to smart city salesmen, from variations on "No Credit" signs to examples of the tall tales of Paul Bunyan and Mike Fink. The first sections...
...this welter of jokes, proverbs, signs, schoolboy howlers, stories, wisecracks, the character of the people gradually emerges, hardbitten, hardworking, unaffected, forever asking two great questions that set the theme of the book: "Where to? What next?" Sandburg puts down with equal approbation a catalog of the casual heroisms of everyday work, the hazards of steelmaking, of mining, of railroading. He records the last words of a wireless operator on a sinking ship ("This is no night to be out without an umbrella!") and the names of railroads: The Delay Linger and Wait is the D. L. & W., the Delaware, Lackawanna...
Brilliantly as Sandburg has captured the flavor of unrecorded wisecracks, most readers will find The People, Yes growing diffuse as the poet approaches his climax and speaks in his own idiom instead of that of his hero. He repeats with love Abe Lincoln's salty observations on the poor, sees Lincoln as one of the people elevated to power who never forgot his origins. He repeats with scorn Hamilton's "Your people, sir, is a great beast." Brooding on unemployment, hard times, strikes, revolutions, wars, he sees the people succumbing to one false leader after another, tricked...