Poems for the People - Softcover

Sandburg, Carl

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1566634032 ISBN 13: 9781566634038

Publisher: Ivan R. Dee, 2001

Synopsis

In the winter of 1914, Carl Sandburg, then a reporter at The Day Book in Chicago, submitted several of his poems to Harriet Monroe's Poetry magazine. The title poem began: “Hog Butcher for the World, / Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat...” Monroe at first hesitated to accept the poems because of “their unorthodox form and their range from brutality to misty lyricism.” But she took a deep breath and printed them. In the decade that followed, Sandburg came quickly to national prominence. In Poems for the People, George and Wilene Hendrick, Sandburg's most accomplished interpreters, have selected seventy-three poems from his early years in Chicago, almost all of them never before in print. Included are poems of social protest, gentle ruminations, and poems about teeming Chicago life. Sandburg may have regarded them as too radical for the time; others may have been set aside and never retrieved. This unearthed treasure, together with the Hendrick's biographical introduction and commentary on the poems, mark Poems for the People as a major publishing event.

About this title

About the Author

George Hendrick is professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Willene Hendrick is an independent scholar. The Hendricks are closely associated with the Sandburg estate and for years have worked with the large Sandburg collection at the University of Illinois. George Hendrick's other books include To Reach Eternity: The Letters of James Jones and Sandburg's More Rootabagas; together the Hendricks have edited Selected Poems of Carl Sandburg.

From Booklist

The 73 previously uncollected Sandburg poems that George and Willene Hendrick offer here are weaker than anything in their revisionary Selected Poems (1996) of Sandburg. Thanks to their unpretentious commentary, however, the 73 become windows further revealing a fascinating, archetypal American. The son of humble Swedish immigrants, Sandburg started working at 13 yet managed, after hoboing and going to war (the Spanish-American), to attend college and become a famous author, folksinger, and lecturer. He began writing poetry in the 1910s, when he was a radical socialist, a stance he modified in the wake of the second Wilson administration's severe persecution of the Left. Since most of these poems date from that time, and since several were withheld from earlier publication because of their fervor, they give us Sandburg-as-radical straight. Never much of a Marxist, Sandburg very appealingly railed against political lying and greedy, brutal capitalists. The few later selections show that he never lost his populist sympathies; especially gratifying in this respect is a good smack at the academic cult of Henry James. Ray Olson

About this edition

• Publisher: Ivan R. Dee
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1566634032
• ISBN 13: 9781566634038
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192
• Editor: Hendrick George, Hendrick Willene