Chapter The Innovators of Index by Simonds History of American Literature

They are experiments in the ancient art of the bard and demand to be read aloud. A hearing of Lindsay's own declamation of these lyrics was almost essential to their effective interpretation.

Many shorter lyrics, notable for their dignity and beauty, accompany these longer and somewhat blatant compositions. A Net to Snare the Moonlight, How a Little Girl Danced, The Wedding of the Rose and the Lotos, Love and Law, are representative of these.

Carl Sandburg, born 1878.

Carl Sandburg, most aggressive and most radical among the representatives of the "new" poetry, is like Lindsay and Masters, a product of the prairie state of Illinois. Born at Galesburg of Swedish stock, his youth was a youth of toil. Employed at various jobs -- on a milk-wagon, in the brick-yards, with a construction gang, in the wheat fields of Kansas, as a house painter; then serving in Porto Rico through the Spanish American war, Sandburg had already learned something of life when he returned to his home town to work his way through Lombard College. Eventually he found his place on the staff of a Chicago newspaper.

"I want the respect of intelligent men," the young man wrote; "but I will choose for myself the intelligent. I love art but I decide for myself what is art. I adore beauty but only my own soul shall tell me what is beauty. I worship God but I define and describe God for myself. I am an individual."¹

This is something more than an echo of Whitman and Emerson; it is the expression of an individuality seeking for the ideal, but determined to seek for it in his own way. Sandburg resembles Whitman more closely than any other of his contemporaries; -- not only in the free verse form of his compositions, but in their spirit; he is the unabashed apostle of democracy, an idealist and a revolutionary.

Chicago Poems appeared in 1916, but the poem, Chicago, which introduces the volume, was first printed in the magazine, Poetry, in 1914. It is fairly typical of Sandburg's verse.

"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:"

Such is the introduction of this Whitman-like composition. More pleasing is the Sketch, which follows; and the description of the fog-bound lake steamer in Lost:

"Desolate and lone
All night long on the lake
Where fog trails and mist creeps,
The whistle of a boat
Calls and cries unendingly,
Like some lost child
In tears and trouble
Hunting the harbor's breast
And the harbor's eyes."

Cornhuskers (1918) and Smoke and Steel (1920) are the titles of later volumes. One of the best examples of Carl Sandburg's real achievements in free verse is the long composition, Prairie, which stands first in Cornhuskers; it is a vivid and impressive interpretation -- and not devoid of poetry.

"There is a song deep as the fall time redhaws, long as the layer of black loam we go to, the shine of the morning star over the corn belt, the wave line of dawn up a wheat valley."

Books of Reference.

Helpful comment and criticism, together with selections from the works of the free verse poets, will be found in the following books: Some Imagist Poets, Amy Lowell (Houghton Mifflin); Tendencies in Modern American Poetry, Amy Lowell (Houghton Mifflin); The New Era in American Poetry, Louis Untermeyer (Holt); New Voices, Marguerite Wilkinson (Macmillan); The New Poetry Anthology, Harriet Monroe and Alice C. Henderson. A Study of Poetry by Bliss Perry (Houghton Mifflin) is especially recommended as an illuminating discussion of the principles and processes of the poetic art.