The Poet is a heroic figure belonging to all ages; whom all ages possess, when once he is produced, whom the newest age as the oldest may produce—and will produce, always when Nature pleases. Let Nature send a Hero-soul; in no age is it other than possible that he may be shaped into a Poet.

—Thomas Carlyle

Passages like my epigraph probably go a long way toward suggesting that Carlyle was more than a little nuts. Who, in our day, would search among poets for a hero? With only a few exceptions, poets in our time have found a home in the university, where they are rather dim figures, permitted to work at their craft, not so much an ornament to the culture as something closer to a parasite upon it, living from grant to grant, workshop to workshop, involved in an intense relationship with the Self, that all-consuming locust of our age, which chomps up all before it. Such, usually without rhyme and often without reason, has increasingly become the obscure habitat and vocation of the poet at the end of the 20th century.

To find an American poet who received public adulation worthy of the kind of heroism described by Carlyle, one must go as far back as 1878. The poet born in that year was not T.S. Eliot, for some a hero of culture, or Robert Frost, who late in life had an unusually wide public following, but Carl Sandburg, a poet not so much forgotten as scarcely any longer read. Whether Sandburg was truly a poet is itself nowadays in doubt. That in his day he enjoyed the fame accorded to a hero is not.

Carl Sandburg is the only American poet ever asked to address Congress, a date he was able to fit into his crowded schedule in 1959. He also appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show, the Texaco Hour (with Milton Berle), the early Today Show (with Dave Garroway), and See It Now, where he was interviewed by Edward R. Murrow. Sandburg once wrote a poem to which, on television, Gene Kelly danced. The house in which he was born was preserved as a memorial to him while he was still alive, and inside its front door hung—no doubt hangs still—a tribute from Stephen Vincent Benét; in part, ungrammatically, it reads: “A great American, we have just reason to be proud that he has lived and written in our time.”

Perhaps no poet—or literary man generally—was more gaudily praised in his lifetime than Carl Sandburg. About the first volume of Sandburg’s autobiography the playwright Robert Sherwood observed that it was the greatest work of its kind ever written by an American, “not forgetting Benjamin Franklin, nor Henry Adams, nor showing them disrespect.” In a book about Sandburg, Harry Golden (of Only in America fame) noted: “It is not exaggerated to say you would learn more about the industrialization of America reading Sandburg’s poems than you would learn about Elizabeth’s England reading Shakespeare’s plays.” The British novelist and political journalist Rebecca West compared him to Robert Burns as “a national poet.” The American socialist leader Eugene V. Debs said that he was “one of the very few really great poets of our day, and the future will know him to the remotest generation.” Many years later the television commentator Eric Sevareid remarked: “I want to say that Carl is the strongest and most enduring force in American letters today.” Taken all in all, not a bad little set of blurbs.

Sandburg also enjoyed the kind of fame in his lifetime which, among American writers, perhaps only Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway had in theirs, and Sandburg’s was probably greater. Like theirs, his was not a coterie fame, or fame limited to a university readership. For many years Sandburg was perhaps the most frequently read living writer in American high schools. He was often called “the People’s Poet.” Playboy once paid him $3,600 for six poems and a parable. (“It was fun,” Sandburg is said to have remarked, “to be read by the most gustatory audience of readers in America, all of them definitely opposed to artificial insemination.”) He also got large fees for poetry published in the Woman’s Home Companion, Collier’s, the Saturday Evening Post, and even Fortune. Hollywood, which had earlier paid him more than $100,000 to write a novel from which it hoped to make a movie—the project did not work out—hired him once more to work on the screenplay for Fulton Oursler’s The Greatest Story Ever Told. Sandburg’s reputation was large enough for Westbrook Pegler, the New York columnist, to attack him on a number of occasions, usually referring to him as “the proletarian millionaire.” For a poet, this was big-time stuff—fame on the show-biz standard.

Sandburg seemed to sustain his reputation, however, only as long as he lived. Once he died (in 1967) it went down faster than the Hindenburg. Today, put the name Sandburg on one of E.D. Hirsch’s cultural-literacy tests and, my guess is, the response it would elicit would overwhelmingly be, “Second-baseman, Chicago Cubs.” Of course in his last years there were already signs of his future loss of popularity, one of them being that he did not even make Dwight Macdonald’s 1960 anthology of parodies—he, poet of the most parodiable of all modern poetic styles. Perhaps a parody of Carl Sandburg would have been considered too easy, which, as I shall try to demonstrate, it certainly is:

Hot bitcher for the Gnarled,
Fool Shaker, Shackler of Feet,
Flayer with Male Toads and the Nation’s
  Fright Hondler;
Horny, Busty, Stalling,
City of the Low Rollers.

Sandburg himself was not altogether ignorant of the vicissitudes of reputation. “Fame is a figment of a pigment,” he once wrote. “It comes and goes. It changes with every generation. There never were two fames alike. One fame is precious and luminous; another is a bubble of a bauble.” And so it was with his fame: the poet in whose honor a day was declared in North Carolina, who received the Albert Einstein Award from Yeshiva University, who had schools and real-estate developments named for him in Chicago, who was given God knows how many honorary degrees from Harvard on down, who won two Pulitzer Prizes (one for the first volumes of his biography of Abraham Lincoln in 1940 and one for his Collected Poems in 1951), who was actually regarded as a possible Republican presidential candidate to run in 1940 against Franklin D. Roosevelt, then seeking his third term—the reputation of this same poet is today in a condition he himself called “complete fadeout,” with, I should guess, very little chance of revival.

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How did Carl Sandburg achieve, sustain, and lose fame so completely? For anyone interested in the history of reputation, his case presents a fascinating chapter.

On the subject of Sandburg’s ascent, we now have a detailed account in Carl Sandburg, by Penelope Niven.¹ The book is very much in the contemporary mode of epic biography—epic in this context meaning nearly endless. If in architecture less can be more, in biography more not infrequently turns out to be less. Miss Niven’s book, the result of years of work in a vast Sandburg archive, is another case in point.

Hesketh Pearson, the English biographer, once wrote that “the majority of reliable biographies are unreadable, and the majority of readable biographies are unreliable.” I cannot call Miss Niven’s biography unreadable, since I seem to have read it; nor am I prepared to say that it is unreliable, since an enormous amount of research has clearly gone into its making. The insurmountable problem with the book is that it is altogether too uncritical of, and insufficiently distanced from, its subject. Miss Niven is all panting admiration for Sandburg, and everything about and connected with him. She is to Carl Sandburg as Carl Sandburg was to Abraham Lincoln. But Sandburg, it will surprise no one to learn, was no Lincoln.

Miss Niven’s unstinting admiration leads her to take Sandburg at his own high self-valuation, which further leads her to assume that everything about his life is important, which in its turn leads to an unseemly quantity of gushing on her part. “His poems,” she writes, “read in chronology and context, are a man’s autobiography, a nation’s autobiography.” Miss Niven goes on and on about Sandburg’s “fiery oratory,” his “biting news columns,” his “orator’s ear for cadence and dramatic effect which led him closer to discovery of his inner, poetic voice.” It is all more than a bit of a muchness.

The one thing to be said for biographies on the gargantuan scale is that they do supply an impressive pile of facts out of which a more critical reader may derive his own, often quite discrepant picture of the subject. Such at any rate is my debt to Miss Niven, and I hope I shall be forgiven for putting her diligence to my own very different purposes.

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Carl Sandburg was a child of the same Midwest with which his name would be associated throughout his adult life, and remains associated to this day. He was born in Galesburg, Illinois, to immigrant parents, Swedes, in less than easy circumstances. His father was a blacksmith’s helper on the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad; his mother had been a hotel maid. He was his parents’ second child, the first son of seven children, two of whom died of diphtheria in the winter of 1892. His was not an easy youth, being brought up in Galesburg, a town in which the local chapter of the Women’s Christian Temperance Movement was prominent, and in a household dominated by a stern father whose unrelieved dourness could have landed him a walk-on part in an Ingmar Bergman movie.

The Sandburgs lived close to the bone. Buying a house in Galesburg, August Sandburg had entered into a bad mortgage, and his ill luck was compounded by the panic of 1893. There was not enough money for Carl to go to high school. Instead he was needed to work—he had a newspaper route, later delivered milk for a dairy—to bring in money for the household. He continued his reading with the help of his older sister, who was permitted to finish high school in the hope that she would become a teacher, as she eventually did. In an attempt to Americanize his name, Sandburg called himself Charlie. When he later decided to write poetry, his father is supposed to have asked, “Iss dere any money in diss poetry business, Sholly?” It turned out that, properly worked, there was quite a bit.

Sandburg first saw Chicago, traveling on his father’s railroad pass, when he was eighteen. It blew him away. It also set him on the road. Not long after, he rode the rails to Kansas, where, as a hobo, he worked the wheat fields. (The distinction among tramps, hobos, and bums was that tramps wandered but did not work, hobos wandered and worked, and bums neither wandered nor worked.) From his days among tramps and hobos, Sandburg acquired the rudiments of his lifelong socialism, which was of the turn-of-the-century, peculiarly American strain, more populist and sentimental than Communist. This period also gave him his first inkling that he might one day be a writer. Coincidentally, it was during these same years, the 1890’s, that Jack London, too, lived as a tramp, extracting much material for his novels and stories. As a training for writers, traveling about the country on the cheap was no bad form of education, better, surely, than graduate school.

Sandburg would eventually go to college, back in Galesburg, but first he joined up for, though he did not fight in, the Spanish-American War, a conflict that produced more casualties from disease than from battle. As a veteran, he could attend Lombard College tuition-free, which he did while working at the Galesburg fire department. His family had meanwhile come up in the world, thanks chiefly to his father’s having bought another house, this one large enough to rent out portions to tenants. Charlie—he had not yet returned to the name Carl—was a great figure in college: a serious student, a basketball star, a member of the debating society, editor of the school paper. He had fallen under the influence of a mildly polymathic professor named Philip Green Wright, who was himself, Miss Niven reports, something of a William Morris socialist. Sandburg had also begun reading Charles Lamb, William James, John Ruskin; he discovered Walt Whitman, with whom he would later often be compared, and compare himself. He was put up for but did not pass the examinations to West Point; had he been accepted, he would have been in the same class there as Douglas MacArthur.

Midwestern culture in the days of Sandburg’s youth and early manhood was largely an oratorical culture, the culture of the Chautauqua movement and of the visiting lecturer. William Jennings Bryan, a powerful speaker, was one of young Sandburg’s early political heroes. Elbert Hubbard, advertising man, publisher, vaudeville performer, spellbinding lecturer, and author of the immensely best-selling pamphlet A Message to García, was another great figure for Sandburg. Politics and culture, being so closely connected with oratory, were both intertwined with salesmanship. In his own day, Sandburg did a bit of it all: he sold stereoscopic machines, he told Swedish jokes on the stage, he worked in an advertising agency, he gave lectures for fees. During a period when he was selling stereoscopic machines, hawking his poems, and trying to set up lectures, he called himself a “hustler.” My sense is that, in good part, a hustler he always remained—and a quite brilliant hustler, too.

Was it Cromwell of whom it was said that he was “wily for the public good”? One might say of Sandburg, in something of the reverse spirit, that he was an idealist who was always in business for himself. When in his early twenties he became an organizer for the Socialist party in Wisconsin—he was allowed to keep, as wages, the dues of the new members he brought into the party—he viewed his work as in part an excellent way to perfect his performance as a lecturer. Miss Niven prints a 1906 photograph that Sandburg sent out to prospective customers for his lectures: it is very carefully posed to make him seem dark and dramatic. He was always his own best publicity agent. He did a set lecture on Walt Whitman as a brother to the great prophets and teachers, an American dreamer, interested in human betterment. One generally does well to beware those who are always exalting dreamers; they are themselves usually awake at all times to the main chance.

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As a young man, Sandburg bounced around a good bit in the Socialist party, not only organizing but writing and editing for the socialist press. It was through this work that, at party headquarters in Milwaukee, he met Lillian Steichen, who was to be his wife. Later Sandburg, in a bit of (unconscious?) egotism, said of their meeting that he had been looking for “the kind of woman I would be if I were a woman.” She had gone to the nascent University of Chicago, was on a health-food diet, and when they married she agreed to wear a wedding ring only as a “concession to bourgeois morals” and to “satisfy the prejudices of the proletariat.” They asked the minister to omit the word “obey” from their vows. She called him Carl, he called her Paula: they were a proto-hippie couple, and if Birkenstock sandals had been invented, they would no doubt have worn them.

Paula Sandburg laid the flattery on her husband with a forklift. It was she who first noted that the socialist movement would “need its Poet,” she who first called him “the People’s Poet.” She once wrote to him: “You are a Man! You are all the separate intensities of Shelley—. . . Walt Whitman—Marx—Wagner—the Vikings—Christ—Buddha—Lincoln—Heine—Browning—You are all these separate and different intensities. But harmonized!” She kept this stuff up his life long. Harry Golden, in his panegyrical book on Sandburg, tells of the woman tourist who impulsively kissed the eighty-year-old poet and to whom Paula said: “That’s all right, he belongs to the world.”

Paula Steichen was the sister of Edward Steichen, one of the key Figures of modern photography, and in him Sandburg might be said to have gotten the brother-in-law he deserved. Each man seemed to go at things at a Himalayan level of generality. Sandburg’s favorite book of his own poems is entitled The People, Yes, and Steichen’s most famous book of photographs (to which Sandburg supplied the text), a worldwide bestseller in its day, is entitled The Family of Man. Sandburg wrote a book about Steichen, Steichen frequently (and in rather pompous poses) photographed Sandburg. Each seemed to be regularly calling the other a genius. “He throws a long shadow and ranks close to Ben Franklin and Leonardo da Vinci when it comes to versatility,” said Sandburg of Steichen. “On the day that God made Carl,” Steichen said at a dinner marking Sandburg’s seventy-fifth birthday, “He didn’t do anything else that day but sit around and feel good.” As Sandburg lived on a fairly steady diet of exaggerated praise of this kind, it is small wonder that he was extremely touchy about criticism.

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But to return to Sandburg’s youth: while moving from job to job—he turned out advertising copy for a Milwaukee department store, served as secretary to the socialist mayor of Milwaukee, lectured for the Wisconsin Anti-Tuberculosis Association, did journalism for newspapers and business and trade magazines in Chicago—he also wrote poems. He was a free-verse man—one of those fellows, as Robert Frost famously put it, who prefer to play tennis without a net—and his poems met with uneven success when he sent them around to editors. Sandburg’s great breakthrough came in 1914, when Harriet Monroe accepted nine poems for Poetry: A Magazine of Verse; she ran them as the lead item in her March 1914 issue under the rubric, “Chicago Poems.”

Acceptance at Poetry was the making of Sandburg. It not only put him in the company of William Butler Yeats, Robert Frost, D.H. Lawrence, Hart Crane, and Edward Arlington Robinson, all of whom published in Poetry that year, but gave him a new status as an artist, both in the world and in his own eyes. Culture was the key that unlocked many doors in Chicago. Better yet, his poems represented avant-garde culture: they were criticized in genteel quarters for what was thought to be their brutality. Sandburg, suddenly, became the eponymous leader of something that would be known as “the hog butcher school of poetry.” A better debut could not have been imagined.

That Sandburg was now seen—and, through Poetry, authenticated—as an artist gave him special cachet even in the hard-boiled world of Chicago journalism. He was fortunate in having landed a job on the Chicago Daily News, where he had been recommended to the managing editor, an extraordinary man named Henry Justin Smith, by Ben Hecht, the novelist and short-story writer who was himself then working at the paper. Sandburg “is a man who can write poetry like Whitman,” Hecht told the editor. In our day this might get you fired from the New York Times, but Henry Justin Smith, according to Hecht, “saw the paper as a daily novel written by a school of ‘Balzacs,’ but we were missing a poet.” Sandburg was not only hired but treated with the highest regard.

A job on the Daily News also put Sandburg smack-dab in the middle of what became known as the Chicago Renaissance, that gathering of writers, journalists, and artists which enjoyed a brief efflorescence during the second decade of the century, when H.L. Mencken called Chicago “the literary capital of the United States.” More lunching than writing got done, as Ben Hecht noted in his autobiography, and there was much in the way of hijinks at local clubs and restaurants. But Sandburg’s reputation benefited from the general réclame of the putative literary renaissance in Chicago. His poem “Chicago,” which set clichés about the city in stone for future decades, came as close to an anthem as the Chicago Renaissance ever had.

Sandburg was by this time a family man, commuting from and to his suburban home. He and Paula had three daughters. The eldest suffered from epilepsy; the second had been slightly braindamaged by an automobile accident; the third, Helga, who became a novelist, would later rebel against her father. Sandburg would claim, with justice, that he needed a good deal of money to take care of his first two daughters, who never left the household and who would have to be looked after all their lives. He turned out to be a powerful money earner, not least through lecturing and poetry readings. In time, he added folk-singing to his performances.

Meanwhile, Sandburg’s literary reputation continued to grow. He was regularly praised as a poet whose work was vital, brash, “vivid” (as Louis Untermeyer put it in a review in the Masses) “with the health of vulgarity.” Mencken approved him. Important novelists such as Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis were also lined up in Sandburg’s camp. In time, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, the painter Georgia O’Keeffe, and the architect Frank Lloyd Wright would weigh in with praise. He was invited to write poems to order for Thanksgiving and for Christmas—and accepted. He was making the transition from writer to performer.

Miss Niven says that Sandburg found “his subject in poetry at last, and through this burning subject, his voice”; she also tells us that “Sandburg was growing toward a poetry as unorthodox and independent as his politics.” Perhaps this is the place to say that Sandburg’s poetry was not very unorthodox, and his politics not all that independent. Both were essentially sentimental. In his politics, Sandburg was for the People: the little man, the worker, the downtrodden, the ground-down. He was never a Communist, nor was he, like so many American socialists, against American entry into World War I or II. Honorable enough; but when his sentimental political views got into his poetry—and they were the very subject of his poetry—problems inevitably resulted.

In his poetry, as in his politics, he did not have a mind that much liked to go into things. He was always satisfied to stop at the middle distance. “He works in a large, loose medium,” the poet Conrad Aiken once wrote, “inextricably mixing the vivid with the false.” Sandburg had no real appetite for complexity. He never went very deep—no deeper, really, than the folk songs he sang and eventually anthologized in a best-selling collection he called The American Songbag. When his book-length poem, The People, Yes, came out in 1936, Robert Frost objected: “Sandburg is wrong, I say: The People, Yes, and No!”

Sandburg’s reputation, then, did not grow anywhere near so steadily among serious poets and critics as it did in popular circles. Ezra Pound, the Diaghilev of the modern movement in poetry, invited Sandburg to contribute to an anthology, but also said he was not “sure whether your ‘Chicago’ wouldn’t hit harder if it began six lines later and ended five lines sooner.” Still, he granted Sandburg his place. Among other American poets, although Archibald MacLeish continued to think well of Sandburg’s verse, Frost once remarked that Sandburg’s was the only poetry he knew that figured to gain by translation. When the New Criticism came into prominence in the 1940’s, Sandburg’s prestige dropped further. His rolling rhythms and his garrulity could not hold up under the sort of intense scrutiny practiced by the New Critics.

Read today, Sandburg’s poems reveal a dismal sameness. They exhibit mastery over a faded slang, the idiom of a day now done; rhythmically, they still have richness of a kind, which allows them to roll on and on, but with a feeling of uniform thinness. Gertrude Stein once said of the novelist Glenway Wescott that his writing has “a certain syrup but it does not pour”; Sandburg’s poetry pours and pours but has hardly any syrup whatsoever. “O prairie mother, I am one of your boys,” runs a line in Cornhuskers. Cliches run through his verse like calories through cheesecake: see, for instance, “White Ash,” a poem about a lonely hooker with a heart of gold. The note of political optimism goes off, gong-like, in several poems: “Man will yet win/Brother may yet line up with brother.” Reading Sandburg’s poems, one begins better to understand what Valéry meant when he said that “the optimist is always a bad writer.”

Reviewing Sandburg’s Collected Poems in the September 1951 issue of Poetry, William Carlos Williams wrote: “In this massive book covering a period of close to 40 years the poems show no development in the thought, in the technical handling of the material, in the knowledge of the forms, the art of treating the line.” Williams said of “Chicago” that Sandburg’s “first brilliantly successful poem should have been his last.” And he closed: “The Collected Poems make a dune-like mass; no matter where you dig into them it is sand.”

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By the time Williams wrote that review, Sandburg was well out of—well above—the poetry wars. He had long before then acquired the status of a national treasure. (His editor, upon the publication of The People, Yes, told him that the people “damned near owe you a national holiday.”) He was, most famously, the author of a huge biography of Lincoln, a work which had proved an enormous commercial success. “The poets have always understood Lincoln,” wrote the historian Henry Steele Commager, “from Whitman to Emerson to Lindsay and Benét, and it is fitting that from the pen of a poet has come the greatest of all Lincoln biographies. One of the great biographies of our literature.”

Sandburg’s monumental portrait of Lincoln—it runs to more than 4,500 pages and eventually appeared in six volumes—was, from the standpoint of his reputation, a beautiful stroke. The great prairie poet writing the life of the great prairie politician—it was a match made, if not in heaven, then in a publicity office. There were, to be sure, critics. According to Edmund Wilson, in reading it “there are moments when one is tempted to feel that the cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth has been to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.” But the effect of the biography on Sandburg’s career was to connect him with Lincoln in a way that made him seem not only the repository of all Lincolnesque wisdom but the keeper of the Lincoln flame and chief representative of the tradition of our greatest American. As Sandburg poeticized Lincoln, so this biography seemed, in the public mind, to have Lincolnized Carl Sandburg.

I have not read the six-volume Abraham Lincoln, but even in the one-volume edition, which I have read, the work seems to sprawl. It has the characteristic thinness that goes along with Sandburg’s penchant for viewing everything at a distance, for making everything he writes about seem legendary, almost mythical. He was more omniscient than even an omniscient narrator is permitted to be. The feeling of falseness that results is not tempered by the heavily empurpled prose:

He [the young Lincoln] was growing as inevitably as summer corn in Illinois loam. Leaning against the doorpost of a store to which few customers came he was growing, in silence, as corn grows.

Of Lincoln’s courtship of Ann Rutledge:

They were both young, with hope endless, and it could have been he had moments when the sky was to him a sheaf of blue dreams and the rise of the blood-gold red of a full moon in the evening was almost too much to live, see, and remember.

Sandburg developed a style that seems to call for slides to accompany it.

By the time Sandburg finished his Lincoln biography he was receiving between 200 and 400 fan letters a week, which he answered by using variants of thirteen different, rather folksy, form letters. He had more invitations for speaking engagements than he could hope to handle, yet he continued to accept a great many of them. Once, he needed these speaking engagements to keep his family afloat financially. “Without the platform work, of which the guitar and songs are a part,” he told the critic Malcolm Cowley, who teased him about appearing before a Junior League audience, “I could not get by for a living while doing the sort of long-time books I am on.” Yet as the People’s Poet, Lincoln’s Boswell, guru, general sage, and television personality, Sandburg also evidently derived genuine pleasure from his public appearances.

They were extraordinary performances. His was, as we nowadays say, a tight act. I caught it one night in the mid-1950’s at the University of Illinois, where Sandburg easily filled the school’s largest hall. Powerful applause greeted his appearance, thunderous applause his closing. One sensed that one was watching both a historical personage and a performer who was a pro. Sandburg wore a plain black suit and a string tie (if memory serves), and his face—high cheekbones, deep-set eyes—looked sufficiently historical to have come off the carving on the side of a mountain.

Sandburg began by reading a number of poems, offering brief commentaries upon each. He let fly short, haiku-like apothegms of a populist kind. I seem to remember his incanting the line, “Politics is an ass upon which no man has ever rode.” And then he picked up his guitar and out came “John Henry” and other brass oldies. When he was done, there could not have been an unsatisfied customer in the house.

The magic was in the voice. Years before that night in Champaign-Urbana, Ben Hecht remembered: “It was a voice of pauses and undercurrents, with a hint of anger always in it, and a lilt of defiance in its quiet tones. It was a voice that made words sound fresh, and clothed the simplest of sentences with mysteries.” That voice had become oiled and under even better control over the years. Sandburg worked his audience consummately.

Then there was his hair. Writers with a taste for cliché were not above referring to Sandburg as “the silver-thatched poet.” Lank and clean and white, Sandburg’s hair was easily the most impressive of his props. Robert Frost once remarked in a letter to a friend that Sandburg “was possibly hours in town and he spent one of those washing his white hair and toughening his expression for his public performance.” Another time, Frost reportedly told someone that Sandburg was upstairs fixing his hair, “trying to get it in his eyes.” I am reminded of the story of the journalist who was exasperated with Brendan Bracken, Churchill’s minister of information. One day he told Bracken off: “Nothing about you is to be believed, nothing is as it seems. Even your hair, which looks so false—it turns out to be real.”

What, Sandburg was once asked, was it like to be famous? “It’s like a communicable disease,” he replied, “nothing can be done about it.” Certainly he himself did nothing about it, except to soak it up for what it was worth. Even the uncritical Miss Niven concedes:

During the last decade of his life, [Sandburg] was a full-time celebrity, and only a part-time writer. Many people clamored for his attention, sought to superimpose his venerable image on television shows, advertisements, causes, prefaces to books, public occasions, motion pictures. His life was a public circus of entertainment and pilgrimages. . . .

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The sententious garrulity that was always part of Sandburg’s writing grew worse with age. When his verse came under attack by critics and fellow poets, the People’s Poet looked to the people for self-justification. Modern poets, he averred, the sort of poets vaunted by his enemies the New Critics, were anti-democratic, writing not for the people but for each other. “I say to hell with the new poetry,” was his view at seventy-five. Poets today “don’t want poetry to say what it means. They have symbols and abstractions and a code amongst themselves—sometimes I think it’s a series of ear wigglings.” His own poetry, he concluded, because it had a wider audience, must have been better.

Sandburg died at the age of eighty-nine, wealthy, revered, easily the most famous living poet in America, and soon to be almost entirely, if not quite forgotten, unread. He had had a tremendous roll of the dice. Now his work is quite as inert as he. As a young man, in 1909, in a column for the Milwaukee Journal, Sandburg unconsciously wrote his own epitaph: “America has many businessmen but no poets. The reason for this is that we are a nation of hustlers and no poet can be a hustler.” Funny, the things a man, over a long life, can forget.

¹ Scribner's, 843 pp., $35.00.