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...
Sandburg's most famous poem was published in Poetry in 1914, and in his first book in 1916, twenty years before this collection. CS writes with a shotgun rather than, like Dickinson, a marksman's telescopic rifle--the "Loaded Gun that stood in Corners, till the day..." Like Steinbeck, Sandburg is a great writer without being a particularly good writer: both, because their subjects are unprecedented and necessary. In Sandburg's case, "Hope is a tattered flag...the shimmer...the blue hills...an echo...." He does run on, but in the midst of it, wonderful gems, often colloquial: "I got some poles to hold it on the east side / and the wind holds it up on the west."
Even colloquial insults: "Wouldn't you just as soon sing as make that noise?"
Then Sandburg evokes deaths in war, and suicides like Mr Eastman (of the Kodak Co) who apparently committed suicide to guarantee his many cultural bequests that he feared a second stroke might diminish, as he had seen others rewrite wills, narrowing their scope. Sandburg collects details of daily life, the life of the shopper, the farmer, the home-maker and the seamstress, etc. One would have to be as encyclopedic and discursive as the poet to summarize his catalogs of details.
I am coming to see this as an essential read that I missed, that was never emphasized in my own fine education--mostly in English and European literatures. I read some Sandburg nearly a decade ago, but I did not take on his long poem; I guess I left the best for last. For example, as the political windbags pretend to discuss budget in DC, the bloated military (which Eisenhower warned us against) is untouched.
Section 82, The People, Yes:
I pledge my allegiance,
say the munitions makers and the international bankers,
I pledge my allegiance to this flag, that flag,
any flag at all, of any country anywhere
paying its bills and meeting interest on loans,
one and indivisible,
coming through with cash in payment as stipulated
with liberty and justice for all,
say the munitions makers and the international bankers.
--Complete Poems, p 569
One of his poems, incidentally, addresses my future teacher, Archibald MacLeish, on his leaving his Cummington farm to support the war effort in 1940. MacLeish helped my Ph.D. advisor Leonard Unger get me a yearlong postdoc grant to study 17C lunar mapping. When I sent him the result of my year's study, he said it was "better than academic"--which I quote on the backcover of my recent book that addends my lunar piece. It has enraged many of my colleagues who have refused to review my book, The Worlds of Giordano Bruno, UK:Cortex Design (see also Facebook).