Chicago Poems
Updated: Aug 8
Over Christmas, while visiting family in Indianapolis, I stopped in Half-Price Books. I’d already planned to get this year’s books from the library, but I hadn’t arranged for one before leaving town, and I wanted to make sure I had something in hand from my reading list to get started with. I found a hardcover copy of Seinfeldia. It was early in the day—I had hours to kill before dinner with two of my sisters—and I settled down in front of the Classics & Poetry section. My mind was hungering for something. There it was: The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg. It hit me like a bolt out of the blue. I snatched it from the shelf, sat on the floor, and immediately got lost in “Chicago,” “Masses,” “They Will Say,” “The Shovel Man,” “A Teamster’s Farewell,” “Muckers” … I left the book on the shelf (I should have purchased it), added Chicago Poems to my reading list, and, when I’d returned home after the holidays, found a copy in my local library.
Upon Sandburg’s death in 1967, Lyndon B. Johnson observed, “Carl Sandburg was more than the voice of America, more than the poet of its strength and genius. He was America.” After reading, and reflecting upon, Sandburg’s first published collection of poetry, 1916’s Chicago Poems, truer words were never spoken. Sandburg sees people, events, things, as they are: sometimes raw, unflinching, unblinking, concretely; other times beautifully, elegiacally, figuratively; but always—always—openly, honestly, ever traveling, ever seeking—ALIVE. No poet’s poet, nor writer’s writer, Sandburg is a poet of the people, for the people. Unsentimental, straight-talker, swagger in his gait … If only Carl Sandburg were here to train his pencil, his eye, his words, on America today: how we’d cheer, how we’d weep, how we’d wrap ourselves up in the comfort of someone who understands us, who sees us, who loves us, who said, “I am credulous about the destiny of man, and I believe more than I can ever prove of the future of the human race and the importance of illusions …”
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