Thursday, January 29, 2009

Introducing Carl Sandburg

If you're not familiar with Carl Sandburg, you need to get to know him. Not that you'll ever get to meet him -- he's been dead for quite some time, but his words still resonate with power and beauty through his poetry. Even more exciting, many of his poems were never published, and they were recently published through the efforts of his daughter about five years ago. In addition, many of his poems that had been published were re-published in their original form. You see, Carl Sandburg wasn't always as concerned with ridiculing society as was his publishers, so he had to "tone down" many of his poems when first published because his publisher and editor, Alfred Harcourt, founder of the now-great publishing house, feared that he would offend too many powerful and wealthy people. Then, as is now, there was a fear of lawyers.

In my opinion, Sandburg was the first of the great American poets of the 20th Century. I know there would be a lot of debate among poetry lovers because there were many great poets during this time: Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, E.E. Cummings, Amy Lowell, and William Carlos Williams, but I think Sandburg gets the honor because he was definitely the first to write poetry for the common person. This brought him both enormous popularity with the masses as well as enormous criticism from the high-brow critics. But I love this component of him. He didn't take the high-road insofar as language was concerned. He wrote in the colloquialisms of the average blue-collar worker, and he wrote about things that concerned those people.

Sandburg was at first a Socialist, but not in the sense that we know the word today. During the early 20th Century, there was very little regard for workers, and there was a disparity between the working class and the wealthy. Workers were treated with disdain, and they had few rights. Through his poetry, he made it known that he despised greed, and he presented the plight of the common, average citizen in his poetry. The things that we take for granted today, he fought for, and much of his poetry helped pave the way for reforms such as social security for the elderly, health care for workers, safety regulations at work, public education, etc.

Just like all great movements, his writing was key to bringing these issues to the forefront, and then they gained momentum from there. I can't help but think of the great Russian artists, poets, and writers who were so influential in preparing the Russian philosophers for change in the late 19th Century. The arts do play an important aspect in regards to social change, no matter how much we ignore them today. In fact, I believe society's failure to regard pure art today is at the heart of our decline. We embrace greed and capitalism over creativity, and it shows in our values. My hope is that this tradition will change some day in the near future.

Sandburg was famous for embracing the Imagist movement which proclaimed that poetry should be written with vivid imagery, in the least amount of words necessary, and should avoid using rhyming if at all possible. Its objective was to create poems that became images in readers' heads which would allow them to have their own "revelation" as to the meaning of the poem. It was a clear, concise and very powerful way of writing poetry, and it often allowed poets to express their feelings with more freedom than Victorian poets could. Although the Imagists failed to last a long time as a school of poetry, Sandburg continued to write in that style, and his words captured the hearts of millions of people who had never read poetry before.

He also wrote a lot of free-verse, and sometimes mixed in free-verse with metered lines. I'm amazed at how good this works for the subjects he attacked. He is most famous for his poem, "Chicago," which was one of his earliest works, and this poem is an example of that mix. The first seven lines of the poem sum up the Imagist philosophy and his use of free verse, and I'll include them here:

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:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen
your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys....

I tell you, this is a beautiful and accurate portrayal of Chicago during the 1920s. Such a wonderful poem, I wish I could write out the whole thing for you, but I'm sure that you can find it on the Internet somewhere.

He's also famous for fighting Billy Sunday, a famous evangelist and preacher during the early 20th Century, and Sandburg despised him because he saw Sunday as a gimmick, fraud, and money-maker. Everything that Sandburg hated about society (greed, intolerance, false-promises from the wealthy) he saw in Sunday. Here is an excerpt from his poem "Billy Sunday:"

You come along -- tearing your shirt -- yelling about Jesus. I want
to know what the hell you know about Jesus?

Jesus had a way of talking soft, and everybody except a few
bankers and higher-ups among the con men of Jerusalem liked
to have this Jesus around because he never made any fake
passes, and everything he said went and he helped the sick and
gave the people hope...

He goes on to talk about Sunday's love of money, his penchant to friend the wealthy, and his desire to take money from the poor. He was most angry that Sunday preached a message that the corporate heads wanted the poor to hear -- stay satisfied with your lot in life and don't buck the system.

Can you see why the average Joe loved Sandburg? Look at how he wrote. He wasn't writing to the academia, and he didn't give a rat's ass (as he would put it) to what they thought. He was ambassador to the common person, the worker, and the poor, and he brought them art, and he gave them hope.

We need another Carl Sandburg today like nothing else. Poetry has been taken hostage by the academia. Poems no longer resonate with the average reader, and they do not reflect the thoughts, concerns, and issues that normal people experience. Too many poets are concerned with high-brow critics, and too many publishers are afraid to publish poetry that connects with the majority of the population. Why is this? I think it's because it's been too long since academia stole poetry, and it needs to go back to the people.

Well, as you can tell, this is what resonated in me over my break. Poetry is in me. It is me. But there's always been something about the system that bothered me, and my revelation came about this past weekend while reading Sandburg's poetry. No one has taken the baton from him since he died, and that's what I want to do. I need to do it, in fact. And since many doors have been opened to me to publish a book of my own choosing this year, I feel that I cannot let myself down on this one. I'm not the academia. I don't relish living off of high-English. Like Sandburg, I am fortunate to have an education, but I still have roots that are deep in the soil.

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