Americans (Sherman)/A Note on Carl Sandburg
Many of the things which Carl Sandburg relishes I relish: the jingle of the "American language" in the making; the Great Lakes, prairies, mountains, and the diurnal and seasonal scene-shifting of the elements; all kinds of workmen with their tools in city and country, and the "feel" of an axe or shovel in my own hands; the thunder of overland trains and the cross-fire of banter in a barber shop; eating ham-and-eggs with a Chinese chemist at a wayside lunch-counter at four o'clock in the morning, sun-time; the mixed human contacts to be had, for example, in a "common" up-country smoker, where black men, Italians, Poles, Swedes, Japanese, Indians, and Germans commune happily in a thick blue mist, and a fluent young travelling man "making" the resort towns drops into the seat beside me and asks what "line" I am carrying, and I exchange matches and crackers with a Dutchman from Java in blue overalls moving from the sugar-beet fields of Wisconsin to the raspberry district of Michigan, accounting spontaneously for the "yoost" and the "vob" in his vocabulary by his long contact with the North Germanic people.
All these things I relish and am familiar with; and yet, as I study my fourth volume of Mr. Sandburg's poems, I wonder why Mr. Untermeyer and the other fugelmen of the "movement" congratulate the public on the ease with which they may read and enjoy poetry, now that classical allusions and the traditional poetic diction have been banished. It is a sham and a delusion. Mr. Sandburg is not easy to read. He is as difficult in his own fashion as John Donne or Browning. If any of the men in my common smoker should glance over my shoulder at the pages before me, they would see abundance of familiar words: "taxi-drivers, "window-washers," "booze-runners," hat-cleaners," "delicatessen clerks." Perhaps also "shovel-stiffs," "work-plugs," "hoosegow," and "exhausted eggs heads" would be familiar to them. But I think they would gasp and stare at "sneaking scar-faced Nemesis," "miasmic" women, and "macabre" moons. I think they would meditate a long while before they felt any emotion whatever in the presence of such word patterns as:
Flick me, sting me, hold me even and smooth.
And I believe they might read the long title-poem, "Slabs of the Sunburnt West," twenty times without suspecting for a moment that it is a meditation on God, civilization, and immortality, conceived on the brink of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado.
Now, the considerable obscurity in Mr. Sandburg's work may be accounted for in two ways.
In the first place, his literary allegiance is mixed. When in his interesting poem on "The Windy City" he begins a lucid paragraph thus: "Mention proud things, catalogue them"—he is writing under the formative influence of Whitman; and both his language and his emotion are straightforward and sincere. But in "Fins," for example, and in "Pearl Horizons," where he asks the "pearl memories" to flick him and hold him even and smooth, he is writing under the deformative influence of the most artificial phase of Imagism; and both his language and his emotion are tortured and insincere.
In the second place, Mr. Sandburg thinks that he is really sympathetic with the "working classes" and with the unloved and not altogether lovely portion of humanity which Mr. Masefield has sung as "the scum of the earth"; and he imagines that he is pretty much out of sympathy with "the great ones of the earth" and with all those who speak complacently of "the established order." Robert Burns sympathized with the Scotch peasant and wrote of him and for him, incidentally pleasing the rest of mankind. The late James Whitcomb Riley sympathized with the farmer's boy and wrote of him and for him; and as there were a great many farmers' boys in the land, he pleased a wide audience. But Mr. Sandburg, who sympathizes with the taxi-drivers and delicatessen clerks, does not write for them; he writes for the literary smart set, for the readers of The Freeman, The Liberator, The Dial, Vanity Fair, etc.
As a consequence of his confronting this audience, Mr. Sandburg appears to me to lack somewhat the courage of his sympathies. He seldom individualizes his working-man; almost never does the imaginative work of penetrating the consciousness of any definite individual and telling his story coherently with the concrete emotion belonging to it. Instead, he presents a rather vague lyrical sense of the surge of but slightly differentiated "masses"; he gives, as the newspaper does, a collection of accidents to undifferentiated children; he is the voice of the abstract city rather than of the citizen. He chants of dreams, violences, toils, cruelties, and despairs. In his long poem, "And So To-day," commemorating the burial of the Unknown Soldier, he finds, however, an appointed theme; he is in the presence of an almost abstract fate, which he renders piteously concrete by a curious parody of Whitman's threnody on Lincoln in a language of vulgar brutality—a language reflecting, it is to be supposed, the vulgarity and brutality of the civilization for which the Unknown Soldier died, as Mr. Sandburg bitterly suggests, in vain. In the short ironical piece, "At the Gate of the Tombs," adopting once more the most biting lingo of the mob, he expresses powerfully the attitude, let us say, of The New Republic towards the government's treatment of political prisoners and conscientious objectors—"gag 'em, lock 'em up, get 'em bumped off." Radical journals, like. The Nation and. The New Republic, radical journalists like Mr. Upton Sinclair, and radical poets like Mr. Sandburg, create for themselves purely artistic problems of very great difficulty, of which they do not always find triumphant solutions. When, for instance, Mr. Sinclair presents the entire American press, the churches, and the universities as bought, corrupt conspirators against truth, he creates for himself the pretty problem of showing where truth lodges: it is an artistic necessity—till he has shown that, his great picture of iniquity seems incredible, illusory. When Mr. Sandburg, in his poem, "And So To-day," presents the official pageant of mourning for the Unknown Soldier as a farcical mummery; the President, the commanding officers, the "honorable orators, buttoning their prinz alberts," as empty puppets; and the people from sea to sea as stopping for a moment in their business—"with a silence of eggs laid in a row on a pantry shelf"—when Mr. Sandburg presents a great symbolic act of the nation as vacuous and meaningless, he creates for himself the pretty problem of showing where the meaning of the nation lies: till he has shown that, and with at least equal earnestness and power, he is in danger. He is in grave danger of leaving his readers with a sense either that his conception of the nation is illusory or that both he and they inhabit a world of illusions—a world of dreams, violences, toils, cruelties, and despairs, in which nothing really matters, after all.
Mr. Sandburg is not completely unconscious of the problem which he has created. To take a similar case, even Mr. Oswald Garrison Villard, a man who habitually insists upon the hopeless condition of the Republic and the brainlessness and heartlessness of all our public men—even Mr. Villard, insensitive as he is to the "antique symmetry," is apparently not completely unconscious of the problem which he has created. At least jonce or twice every year Mr. Villard drops the muck-rake with which he harries Washington, and/writes an editorial in behalf of the New Testament and the character of Christ, as if to prove to his anxious readers that he really has a definite standard in mind for the administration of the War Department. Mr. Sandburg does likewise. When he has me all but persuaded that he himself is at heart a barbarian, that he feels a deep and genuine gusto in violence and brutality, that his talk about building a "city beautiful" is for the consumption of ladies who actually bore him, that in fact he chafes at the slight discipline which our civilization as yet imposes, and that we are all callous "galoots" and may as well acknowledge it and act accordingly—then he brings me to a pause by his sympathy for the "insignificant" private life, by the choking pathos of his epigram on "the boy nobody knows the name of"; then he stuns me by enjoining himself, with a studious nonchalance, to
To a patch of purple asters at a whitewashed wall:
"Let every man be his own Jesus—that's enough."