Carl Sandburg
The Chicago Poet
“Here is the difference between Dante, Milton, and me. They wrote about hell and never saw the place. I wrote about Chicago after looking the town over for years and years.”
Biographical Information 1878 - 1967
- Left school at 13 and had a series of menial jobs
- Spent a year as a hobo at age 19
- Fought in the Spanish American War
- Went to college at Lombard, but left without taking a degree
- "Rode the Rails" supported financially somewhat by giving an occasional lecture on Whitman or Lincoln
- Wrote for small political journals and became a member of the Socialist Party
- Journalist for the "Chicago Daily News"
- Lived in Chicago from 1919-1930
- Wrote poetry, children's books, and historical pieces including a 2 volume work on Abraham Lincoln
Selected Works of Poetry
- 1916 Chicago Poems
- 1918 Cornhuskers
- 1920 Smoke and Steel
- 1928 Good Morning, America
- 1936 The People, Yes,
Common Style of his Poetry
- Free Verse
- Use of "Simple" language
- Imagist
- Use of the "American language"
- Influenced by Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rudyard Kipling, and Robert Browning
Common Topics of his Poetry
- Portraits of working class people in America
- Industrialization and Commercialism
- Race
- Anti-War
Awards and Legacy
- 1919 Pulitzer Prize for Cornhuskers
- 1940 Pulitzer Prize in History for The War Years, his 2nd volume on Lincoln
- 1951 Pulitzer Prize for Complete Poems
- 1959 Addressed Congress on the commemoration of Lincoln's birth, to this day the only poet ever invited by Congress to make an address
- 1964 Received The Presidential Medal of Freedom
- 1965 First white person to be honored with a lifetime achievement award by the NAACP
"Carl Sandburg was more than the voice of America, more than the poet of its strength and genius. He was America." - Lyndon B. Johnson
Further Reading
Works Cited
Durnell, Hazel. The America of Carl Sandburg. Washington D.C. : The U.P. of Washington D.C., 1965. Print.
MacLeish, Archibald. The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg. New York City: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970. Print
Niven, Penelope. "Carl Sandburg's Life" Modern American Poetry. n.p., Feb. 2000. Web. 16 Mar. 2015.
Sandburg, Carl. Selected Poems. San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1996.