Carl Sandberg reads a Lincoln Portrait as Andre Kostalanetz and orchestra play on the "Toast of the Town" show hosted by Ed Sullivan at the Maxine Elliott Theater in New York, New York. (Photo by Steve Oroz/Michael Ochs Archives)
Carl Sandberg reads a Lincoln Portrait as Andre Kostalanetz and orchestra play on the "Toast of the Town" show hosted by Ed Sullivan at the Maxine Elliott Theater in New York, New York. (Photo by Steve Oroz/Michael Ochs Archives)
(Chicago Poems was Carl Sandburg's first-published book of...)
Chicago Poems was Carl Sandburg's first-published book of verse. Written in the poet's unique, personal idiom, these poems embody a soulfulness, lyric grace, and a love of and compassion for the common man that earned Sandburg a reputation as a "poet of the people."
(Welcome to Rootabaga Country - where the railroad tracks ...)
Welcome to Rootabaga Country - where the railroad tracks go from straight to zigzag, where the pigs wear bibs, and where the Village of Cream Puffs floats in the wind. You'll meet baby balloon pickers, flummywisters, corn fairies, and blue foxes - and if you're not careful, you may never find your way back home!
(Drawn from the early chapters of Carl Sandburg’s Pulitzer...)
Drawn from the early chapters of Carl Sandburg’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, this is the story of Abraham Lincoln’s childhood.
(In this outstanding collection of seventy-seven poems, Sa...)
In this outstanding collection of seventy-seven poems, Sandburg eloquently celebrates the themes that engaged him as a poet for more than half a century of writing- life, love, and death.
(This new collection of Sandburg’s finest and most represe...)
This new collection of Sandburg’s finest and most representative poetry draws on all of his previous volumes and includes four unpublished poems about Lincoln.
Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and The War Years
(Originally published in six volumes, which sold more than...)
Originally published in six volumes, which sold more than one million copies, Carl Sandburg's Abraham Lincoln was praised as the most noteworthy historical biography of Sandburg's generation. His extraordinary portrait brings fully to life the country lawyer who would become one of the most influential and beloved presidents of the American republic.
(Abraham Lincoln carried in his pocket a spiritual book of...)
Abraham Lincoln carried in his pocket a spiritual book of days, titled A Believer’s Daily Treasure, which was originally published in the mid-1800s by the Religious Tract Society of London, England. There is speculation that the devotional may have been given to Lincoln by his wife Mary.
(A representative selection of poems, culled from the Puli...)
A representative selection of poems, culled from the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet’s published verse, plus thirteen poems appearing in book form for the first time.
Carl Sandburg was an American poet, singer of folk songs and ballads, journalist, editor, and biographer. He is best known for his biography of Abraham Lincoln and his early verse celebrations of Chicago, Illinois.
Background
Carl August Sandburg was born on January 6, 1878, in Galesburg, Illinois, United States; the second of seven children of August Sandburg, a blacksmith's assistant, and Clara Mathilda Anderson. His parents had both come to the United States from Sweden.
Education
Sandburg liked to read and decided at age six that he wanted to be a writer, but he left school at the age of thirteen in 1891 to work at a series of jobs - a milk wagon driver, a porter, a bricklayer and a farm laborer. Sandburg traveled extensively through the West, where he began developing a love of the country and its people.
When the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898, he enlisted in the 6th Illinois Infantry. Following eight months of service in the army, Sandburg entered Lombard College in Galesburg, which he left without graduating. There he wrote his first poetry and was encouraged by Professor Philip Green Wright, who privately published several volumes of his poems and essays.
In 1907 Sandburg moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he was district organizer for the Social Democratic Party in the state until 1908. From 1910 to 1912 Sandburg served as secretary to Milwaukee's Socialist mayor Emil Seidel. Later he moved to Chicago, becoming an editorial writer for the Daily News in 1917. During nearly five decades as a newspaperman, he was a local news reporter, an investigative reporter, a war correspondent, a movie critic, and a nationally syndicated columnist. In 1918 Sandburg was hired by the Newspaper Enterprise Association to travel to Norway and Sweden as a correspondent covering World War II.
Meanwhile, his verse began appearing in Poetry magazine; Chicago Poems was published in 1916. He made his reputation as a poet of the American scene with Cornhuskers (1918), Smoke and Steel (1920), and Slabs of the Sunburnt West (1922). Sandburg also wrote three children's books Rootabaga Stories (1922), followed by Rootabaga Pigeons (1923), and Potato Face (1930).
From 1926 to 1939 Sandburg devoted himself mainly to writing the six-volume biography of President Abraham Lincoln, presenting Lincoln as a symbol of the American spirit. He also collected the folk songs that made up The American Songbook (1927).
Honey and Salt (1963), a remarkable achievement for a "part-time" poet in his eighties, contains much of Sandburg's best poetry. Sandburg also collected folk songs and toured the country singing his favorites. He published a collection of these songs, called The American Songbag. Other Sandburg works include a collection of children's stories, Rootabaga Stories (1922); Good Morning, America (1928); The People, Yes (1936); Collected Poems (1950) and Harvest Poems, 1910–1960 (1960). Remembrance Rock (1948), a sweeping view of American history, was his only novel.
Sandburg lived the last 22 years of his life at Connemara, a 245-acre farm in Flat Rock, North Carolina, now a National Historic Site and a unit of the National Park Service. Sandburg died in Flat Rock, North Carolina, on July 22, 1967.
Sandburg was brought up in a largely Republican household, but events such as the local railway workers' strikes and the Chicago Haymarket riots of 1886 got him interested in social justice. He saw the sharp contrast between rich and poor, a dichotomy that instilled in him a distrust of capitalism.
Views
Sandburg's early writings dealt with his belief in social justice and equality and were written in such a way that they barely resembled what most people thought of as poetry. The poems not only tended toward unshaped imitation of a real life but also copied other poets as well. His later poems are more effective than his earlier verse. Here the mellowness and wisdom of age are evident. By this time Sandburg had developed and begun to express a deeply felt sympathy and concern for actual people. Tenderness replaces sentimentality; controlled feelings replace defensive "toughness." There is also a religious element in these last poems that does not appear in Sandburg's earlier work.
Quotations:
"There is an eagle in me that wants to soar, and there is a hippopotamus in me that wants to wallow in the mud.
Strange things blow in through my window on the wings of the night wind and I don't worry about my destiny.
I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes, so live not in your yesterdays, no just for tomorrow, but in the here and now. Keep moving and forget the post mortems; and remember, no one can get the jump on the future."
"Love your neighbor as yourself; but don't take down the fence."
"Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work."
"Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you."
"Nearly all the best things that came to me in life have been unexpected, unplanned by me."
"Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child."
"All human actions are equivalent... and all are on principle doomed to failure."
"I have always felt that a woman has the right to treat the subject of her age with ambiguity until, perhaps, she passes into the realm of over ninety. Then it is better she be candid with herself and with the world."
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"The late Mr. Sandburg was a public performer of the first rank ("Ker-oh-seen!" he crooned in one of the first TV pitches for the jet-engine — ole banjo on his knee, white hair mussed by the jet-stream), a poet of the second rank (who can ever forget that feline-footed fog?) and a biographer of awesome badness." - Gore Vidal
"For Carl Sandburg... is a revolutionary; he must push the world to where he is convinced it ought to be. ...again and again, he deserts the seer's mountain peak for the demagogue's soap-box. ...Mr. Sandburg is like a man striving to batter down a jail with balls of brightly coloured glass." – Amy Lowell
"Sandburg writes American like a foreign language, like a language freshly acquired in which each word has a new and fascinating meaning. It is a language, in fact, which never existed before; the separate words existed, but in the speech of no one man; Sandburg was the first to thesaurize them." - Malcolm Cowley
Connections
In 1907 Carl Sandburg met Lilian Steichen, a schoolteacher and younger sister of the painter and photographer Edward Steichen, and they were married in 1908. The marriage produced three children - Margaret, Janet, and Helga.
Father:
August Sandburg
Mother:
Clara Mathilda Anderson
Wife:
Lilian Steichen
Daughter:
Margaret Sandburg
Daughter:
Janet Sandburg
Daughter:
Helga Sandburg
References
Carl Sandburg: A Biography
Drawing on the extensive archives of the Sandburg Collection, this sweeping portrait of the distinguished American poet follows Sandburg from his 1878 birth, through his private life, to the heights of his literary fame
1964
Carl Sandburg: A Biography
A biography of the poet who became known for his ability to speak to the common people, by shaping out of the plain English of ordinary Americans the voice of their vast experience.
Carl Sandburg
Author Harry Golden penned this perceptive biography of his friend and neighbor, poet Carl Sandburg. He traces Sandburg's life from his boyhood adventures, to his involvement with the American labor movement, through his days as a radical journalist, and finally to his success as a poet.