U of Ideas of General Interest -- April 1999 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Contact: Andrea Lynn, Humanities/Social Sciences Editor (217) 333-2177; [email protected]
CARL SANDBURG Newly published poems reveal an angry side to 'poet of the people'
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- A batch of often angry, but sometimes tender, newly found poems written for the people has been found and published, adding to the current revival of interest in the poet of the people, Carl Sandburg.
The 73 newfound poems in "Carl Sandburg: Poems for the People" describe the bard-journalist's early years in Chicago, 1912 to 1922, where as a reporter he saw -- and recorded -- hundreds of cases of greed, suffering and hypocrisy. Sandburg's voice is very much "that of a social critic who is using the language of common people," said George Hendrick, who with his wife, Willene, found, edited, annotated and wrote the introduction for the new collection, published by Ivan R. Dee.
According to George Hendrick, Sandburg may not have published some of these poems in his lifetime because he felt that they were too radical. Sandburg attacked not only a cruel socioeconomic system, but also specific people whom he felt contributed to that system. For example, Sandburg torched radio commentator H.V. Kaltenborn -- whom he called "Mister Wafflehorn" -- for being out of touch with the people and for selling out -- becoming a voice piece for advertisers.
Nor does Henry James come off well -- "he was a poor fish/and didn't know the way to the post office." James' work "doesn't stink/it exudes an odor/it delivers an effluvia/if you know what I mean." Literary critics also get theirs: "Yes, a book of verse should have answers in the back of the/book, the same as an arithmetic./Mystery we leave to the fortune-tellers; we mustn't put mystery in poetry."
During his lifetime, Sandburg published some 700 poems, and since his death in 1967, several volumes of unpublished poems have come out, including two from the Hendricks, rescued from the deep -- including a bank vault in Asheville, N.C. During the past 25 years, the Hendricks have found hundreds of folders of Sandburg poetry and have helped the U. of I. Library organize "a mass of papers." They also have helped the Library acquire the last Sandburg manuscripts from North Carolina. Thus, "the Sandburg archive as the poet left it, is now in the University Library," George Hendrick said.
These tasks have been made even more complex because Sandburg had an organizing system "that he understood," Hendrick said, while Sandburg's daughters and wife had their systems. However, the idiosyncrasies of the systems can serve as clues to help scholars such as the Hendricks date and organize Sandburg's work. Any poem that had been cut and pasted onto a particular kind of paper, for example, was Mrs. Sandburg's doing, and could be classified as an original Chicago poem.
The Sandburgs went to Chicago in 1912. Originally from Galesburg, Ill., Sandburg was building a career in journalism, having written for Socialist papers in Wisconsin. In Chicago, he worked on the Evening World and then The Day Book, both left-leaning papers. Harriet Monroe, the editor of Chicago-based Poetry magazine took a huge risk and published nine Sandburg poems in March 1914, the lead poem being "Chicago" -- "Hog Butcher for the World/Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat."
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