Sandburg and "The People": His Literary Populism Reappraised

Abstract

T HE HARDEST PART of being a pioneer is remaining a contemporary, Morton D. Zabel wrote of Sandburg in I936 It has been Sandburg's misfortune to see his own reputation decline during dozen years since his most successful poetry was published. Rising to fame in excitement of Little Renaissance, he ccontinued during '20's and '30's to be popular among readers who take their poetry seriously. When lyricism of Aiken, Cummings and Millay set boom decade to music, Carl Sandburg described deserted city brickyards where Fluxions of yellow and dusk on waters / Make a wide dreaming pansy of an old pond in night. When depression gave poetry of social protest its short-lived hour, Sandburg found his fame greater than it had ever been. He had been protesting for twenty years; old lines in Hog butcher for world sounded still fresh, while those of Masters and Lindsay, his fellow-rebels of Little Renaissance, seemed naive and quaintly dated. From beginning an accurate observer of urban scene, Sandburg had made city life surface as well as subject of his poetry. His was a realistic voice which caught cacaphonous choruses of the mob-the crowd-the mass and made a new poetry, in a new form, from jangling noises about our ears. Sandburg has a following still, but it no longer numbers many of modern poetry's serious readers. loose, proselike surface, flat, colloquial diction, and apparent lack of organization and of intensity in his verse have alienated those who see Eliot, Pound, and Wallace Stevens as chief poetic spokesmen of contemporary dilemma. The age demanded an image / Of its accelerated grimace, Pound told us when age had scarcely begun; within a few short years Sandburg's image for age seemed singularly inappropriate. He had made an ab-