Carl Sandburg's Impact On American People

Poetry is a literary work in which special intensity is given to the expression of feelings and ideas by use of distinctive style and rhythm. Poetry as a whole has had a huge impact on American people and the way some think about their lives today. Carl Sandburg is one of many American poets; his words have penetrated the minds of many people across the world. Carl was not only a poet. He began his work writing historical readings about a man that had a huge impact on his life, Abraham Lincoln. He also wrote many short stories in the children’s literature area.

Carl Sandburg was born on January 6, 1878 in a 3 room cottage in Galesburg Illinois, which is now maintained by the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency. Carl worked from when he was

very young, he ended his education after graduating from 8th grade and began to work many small jobs, jobs like delivering milk, laying bricks, harvesting ice, and shining shoes in the Galesburg Hotel. At the age of 19 Sandburg took on the life of traveling as a homeless man. While being homeless Carl learned many folk songs which greatly influenced his writing. Also with being homeless, his political views were greatly impacted. In 1898 when the Spanish-American War broke out, Sandburg volunteered for service and at the age of 20 he was ordered to Puerto Rico where he spent a few days only battling heat and mosquitoes. Upon his return, Carl enrolled into Lombard University where he shaped his writing skills and literary talents. Sandburg honed in on his writing skills and printed his first book, In Reckless Ecstasy on Wright’s basement press in 1904. After this Wright printed two more volumes for him, Incidentals and The Plaint of a Rose.
In 1907 Sandburg worked as an organizer for the Wisconsin Democratic Party, he used his writing talents to make political pamphlets and literature and distribute them to the public.

While attending a party brought on from work, Carl met Lilian Steichen, whom he later married in 1908. Because he became a married man, Sandburg needed to take up the responsibilities of supporting a family. So he moved back to Illinois with his new wife and took up journalism. He worked as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News covering labor issues and later writing his own feature. Carl was almost completely unknown to the literary world until in 1914 his poems were published in a nationally circulated poetry magazine. Two years later Sandburg’s book Chicago Poems was published and this brought him to a point in his career that would bring him international acclaim. He then began writing more poetry which later led to him writing a children’s book of fanciful tales, Rootabaga Stories. This book sparked his publisher into suggesting to Sandburg that he should write a children’s reading level biography of Abraham Lincoln. Carl took this into strong consideration and published not a children’s book, but a two volume biography for adults on Lincoln called, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, in 1926. After this he moved to his new home in Michigan where he devoted the next four years of his life to writing four more volumes about Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years. The Sandburg’s then moved to Flat Rock, North Carolina. On July 22, 1967 Carl Sandburg died at his North Carolina home, his ashes were returned to his birthplace in Giles, Illinois. Ten years later Lilian Sandburg passed away, her ashes were placed next to Carl’s at the small Carl Sandburg Park underneath Remembrance Rock, a red granite

boulder.
In 1926 Carl Sandburg wrote an autobiography of Abraham Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years. Originally, this book was planned to be a one-volume biography for children, this work grew to become a two-volume popular biography for adults. This biography traces Abraham Lincoln’s life up until when he left Springfield, Illinois for the presidential inauguration in Washington. Both of these volumes were dedicated to Carl’s parents.
“Sandburg’s work serves as a milestone in the 20th-century mythologizing of Lincoln beginning with the president’s log cabin origins, culminating in his becoming the embodiment of all virtues, including honesty and sympathy for the underdog. The biography had been called an “Illinois pastoral,” in which an idealized figure is presented as growing out of an idealized natural environment; Sandburg, identifying with Lincoln, is said to have been writing his own personal pastoral as well. Sherwood Anderson declared the work “too full of horse collars,” replete with a tiresome “earthy earthiness.” The critic Edmund Wilson, calling the book “insufferable,” quotes descriptions of Lincoln’s mother and his legendary love Ann Rutledge and declares that the author is not compiling Lincoln folklore, but rather actively contributing to it (Pinkerton 04).”
After success in his historical writings Carl Sandburg wrote a book full of poems about Chicago, this book was called Chicago Poems. Sandburg finished writing Chicago Poems in 1916 and it was published in the same year. This book contained Carl’s most famous poems like, Chicago, Sketch, Masses, and many more. Carl bases his poetry off of man-made things, such as sparkling sky scrapers, high rises, and the streets of cities, in his case the central city of Chicago. Scott C. Holstad of the Asheville Poetry Review has a very well thought out analysis of Sandburg’s works in Chicago Poems.
“Sandburg’s Chicago Poems (1916) bears witness to his mid-American originality. While many of his contemporaries (Frost, Masters, Robinson) are thematically dependent upon rural and small town settings for the focus of their poems, Sandburg writes instead of cities (“Chicago”) and high-rises (“Skyscraper”). In Sandburg’s version of Nature, people have been taken away “from the sun and the dew / And the glimmers that played in the grass under the great sky, / And the reckless rain” and have been forced to live in a cold, increasingly mechanized society: forced to “work, broken and smothered, for bread and wages, / To eat dust in their throats and die empty-hearted / For a little handful of pay on a few Saturday nights” (“They Will Say” 5–6).
Unlike Frosts’ sleepy apple orchards and country mending walls, Sandburg’s Chicago is the “Hog Butcher for the World,” “brawling” and “Stormy,” “wicked” and “brutal” (“Chicago” 3). In it, “the skyscraper looms in the smoke and sun” (“Skyscraper” 31), yet it “has a soul.” Only later do we realize that the skyscrapers of the city have souls because of human death: “One man fell from a girder and broke his neck at the end of a straight/plunge — he is here — his soul has gone into the stones of the building” (32). In this world, then, the faceless, uncaring city violently subverts Nature in its appetite for human flesh. Sandburg also differs from most of his contemporaries in the style and language found in Chicago Poems. While Edgar Arlington Robinson and Robert Frost were still using rhyme and meter (predominantly), Sandburg wrote free verse poems. Yet despite the apparent lack of formal poetic devices, the poems in the book (especially “Chicago”) are, as quite formal in structure. Essentially ternary, [“Chicago”] makes a statement, takes off in departure, and ends in recapitulation. After the opening epithets comes a development section making use of parallelism, variety of line length, subtle shift of tone; then comes the recapitulation, the opening phrases in delicately shaded variation (Holstad 04).”
The opening lines in Sandburg’s poem Chicago is often a big topic among critics. As Scott C. Holstad says, “The poem “Chicago” immediately hits the reader with the earthy idiom of its opening lines: (Holstad 04)”
Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight
Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the big Shoulders (Chicago lines 1-6).
Carl Sandburg was a great American poety and is considered to be one of the best of his time and time after him. He ranged from writing children’s books, to Historical Biographies, to countless numbers of poems about Chicago and many other things.