Well-Educated Mind Poetry: Carl Sandburg

 

Carl Sandburg

American Poet

1878 - 1967

Well-Educated Mind Poetry

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American poet Carl Sandburg had a fascinating life. Born in Illinois, in 1878, to immigrant parents, he dropped out of school at age thirteen to work and support his family. At nineteen, he took a train west and worked as a laborer. Then he enlisted in the U.S. Army as a private in the Spanish-American War. After the war, he attended college, though he did not graduate. Nonetheless, he was already writing poetry and even publishing some of his works. 

Next, he worked as a traveling salesman and then a party organizer for the Social Democrats. And finally, he performed a variety of jobs in the newspaper industry as a journalist, reporter, war correspondent, movie critic, and columnist. 

But it was his wife, Lilian Steichen, who encouraged him to write more poetry -- and seriously. In his lifetime, he had produced over 1600 poems, writing in free verse about social ills, the human spirit, cultures, adventures, the American nation, heroes, corruption, obstacles, nature, and obviously much more. 

In 1964, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Lyndon Johnson. And, of course, he was given awards and prizes for his poetry, as well. But he won a Pulitzer Prize for his historical biography of Abraham Lincoln, which I am interested in reading, if I make time for it, particularly because I own it -- yay!! 

Abraham Lincoln - Carl Sandburg

Following are the suggested poems I read for The Well-Educated Mind Poetry list:

Chicago
Cool Tombs
Elizabeth Umpstead
Fog
Grass
I am the People, the Mob
Nocturne in a Desert Brickyard
The People, Yes
Planked Whitefish
Skyscraper
Smoke and Steel
Window

Some of these I found clever and intriguing, but I was not as inspired or moved like I was with Robert Frost or Paul Laurence Dunbar. The poems by Sandburg were more political or socialist in thought or  difficult topics in general, not warm and fuzzy or pleasant. Many of the aforementioned poems were odd and left me speechless in a empty way. I did not have anything to say about them on GoodReads. I read them and said, "Ooookaaay." Then I moved on. 

But I understand he wrote directly from his personal experiences and observations, and these were things that needed to be said in his time. So, he spoke them in prose.

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