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CARL SANDBURG
Scholars discover 19 poems for children by 'Poet of the People'
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Poet-historian Carl Sandburg took on some big subjects in his lifetime, including a six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize.
Now, nearly 33 years after his death, Sandburg suddenly takes on the world's most common objects and most inexplicable mysteries in 19 newly discovered poems he wrote for children back in the 1930s.
Sandburg's "filed and forgotten" poems, now published in "Poems for Children Nowhere Near Old Enough to Vote" (Knopf), tackle everything from pencils and noses, to the moon and the sky. In the poet's often comic, always whimsical, imagination, "clouds are sky fluff," "The sky is for birds to go up in" and "the moon is a big penny got lost in the sky one windy night."
More down to earth are the toes: "The big toe is the thumb of the foot. All the other toes worry about the little toe. The big toe likes itself very well." When your toes aren't cooperating, you can expect a bit of stumbling: "Stumbling is where you walk and find you are not walking."
The poems, which Sandburg wrote in Harbert, Mich., then filed away in a box, were found and compiled by University of Illinois English professor George Hendrick and Willene Hendrick, an independent scholar. The book is illustrated by celebrated illustrator Istvan Banyai, whose work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker and Rolling Stone.
"Banyai has put pictures together with words and sounds in new ways," the Hendricks write in their introduction. "His lines and pictures run and hop and skip across the page." Like Sandburg, Banyai has "a comic imagination: a chair crosses its legs, like a [parent] relaxing with the evening newspaper after a hard day's work; a line about stumbling wavers, causing a stumble, even a fall."
The Hendricks also write in the introduction -- and in their best Sandburgese -- that "Poets are sometimes forgetful. They write poems, and if these verses are ahead of their time or quite unlike their other poetry, they put them aside for another day. They file them, and there they stay, the paper turning yellow with age, and the poems are forgotten. Something like this seems to have happened with Carl Sandburg's collection 'Poems for Children Nowhere Near Old Enough to Vote.' "
The Hendricks explain that Sandburg was born to poor Swedish immigrants in Galesburg, Ill., and that he was "a fun-loving, questioning, dreamy boy who always wanted to know the whys and the wherefores of things." The poet of the people also "followed his imagination wherever it took him. These poems invite the young -- and the young at heart -- to do the same."
Sandburg's papers and books -- literally tons of them -- are collected in the U. of I. Library. During the past 25 years the Hendricks have found and sifted through hundreds of folders of unpublished Sandburg material and have helped the U. of I. Library acquire its Sandburg Collection. Since the poet's death, several volumes of unpublished poems have come out, including two from the Hendricks.
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