Inspiring Older Readers
Chicago Poems by Carl Sandburg
I doubt very much whether the poetry of Carl Sandburg has ever featured prominently on the literature curricula of schools and colleges in the UK. I certainly never came across him right through my time at school, college or university and yet in an American context he’s a pretty big figure – although I would guess an ever less relevant ( or at least less read) one even there.
Born in 1878 Sandburg was part of a working class family with Swedish immigrant ancestry and spent the early years of his youth in a range of manual jobs that took him travelling across the States. During this time he lived constantly on the edge of poverty and began to develop political views that would see him eventually join the Social Democratic Party and place the American worker at the centre of his concerns. In 1908 he married Lilian Steichen ( daughter of photographer Edward Steichen ) and these new responsibilities led him to seek work as a journalist in an attempt to carve out a steady income.
He was pretty much unknown to the literary establishment when he published Chicago Poems in 1916 and this volume became the platform that launched a career that would eventually include two Pulitzer Prizes. The most famous of this collection must be the first in the sequence which is simply entitled Chicago. It’s a truly wonderful, robust, muscular hymn to this working class urban metropolis :
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.
Elsewhere in the collection – in They Will Say for example - Sandburg laments the loss of the rural way of life of the past and the workers lot that has been forced upon them. I was struck by just how much this echoes the message of the English Romantic poets of a century or more before who also saw industrialisation as a sort of imprisonment of the spirit. I think it would be hard to argue against the influence of Blake in these words:
“OF my city the worst that men will ever say is this:
You took little children away from the sun and the dew,
And the glimmers that played in the grass under the great sky,
And the reckless rain; you put them between walls
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.”
Sandburg is also no respecter of poetic tradition – rhyme and meter are much less important to him than impact and vitality. His muscular free verse seems perfectly suited to his subject matter:
TWENTY men stand watching the muckers.
Stabbing the sides of the ditch
Where clay gleams yellow,
Driving the blades of their shovels
Deeper and deeper for the new gas mains
Wiping sweat off their faces
With red bandanas
The muckers work on . . pausing . . to pull
Their boots out of suckholes where they slosh.
Of the twenty looking on
Ten murmer, "O, it’s a hell of a job,"
Ten others, "Jesus, I wish I had the job."
(Muckers)
Sandburg’s language is also, I think, deliberately anti-poetic. Instead of the studied poetical language of his contemporaries he opts for the lumpy, often coarse diction of the working man or the social outsider. You’ll find the voice of the criminal, the prostitute, the shipbuilder and the blue-collar Joe’s who built the city and who in their vital ways make it tick.
I think there are those who would now see some of the language Sandburg uses as quite difficult and certainly not ‘politically correct’ – see the poems ‘Cripple’ and ‘Nigger’ for example – but to criticise him for lacking at 21st century sensibility would be unfair. His language is the discourse of that age and certainly the language of the people he writes about and for.
In the same way that Walt Whitman can often seem to capture the unspoken voice of a pioneer nation, Sandburg feels to me like he is distilling the essential working class urban experience of the US in those early years of the 20th century when exploitative capitalism was at full throttle and there was still an alternative ideology capable of critiquing what was happening to people. Many of the poems are very short, nothing but glimpses or tiny vignettes that come together to produce a wider tapestry of the streets, the homes, the factories and the offices of everyday life. Bracing stuff.
Terry Potter
November 2016