Carl Sandburg, he was America
Do you teach a big poetry unit in February? It does seem to be the perfect time to bring in rhyme and rhythm and imagery and metaphors.
Who was Carl Sandburg?
Carl Sandburg was an American poet, writer, and editor who won three Pulitzer Prizes: two for his poetry and one for his biography of Abraham Lincoln. During his lifetime, Sandburg was widely regarded as a major figure in contemporary literature, especially for his volumes of his collected verse, including "Chicago Poems", "Cornhuskers", and "Smoke and Steel." He enjoyed unrivaled appeal as a poet in his day, perhaps because the breadth of his experiences connected him with so many strands of American life, and at his death in 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson observed that "Carl Sandburg was more than the voice of America, more than the poet of its strength and genius. He was America."
Life
Carl Sandburg was born in a three-room cottage at 313 East Third Street in Galesburg, Illinois, on January 6, 1878, to Clara Mathilda Anderson and August Sandberg, both of Swedish ancestry. He adopted the nickname "Charles" or "Charlie" in elementary school at about the time he and his two oldest siblings changed the spelling of their last name to "Sandburg."
At the age of thirteen, he left school and began driving a milk wagon. From the age of about fourteen until he was seventeen or eighteen, he worked as a porter at the Union Hotel barbershop in Galesburg. After that, he was on the milk route again for eighteen months. He then became a bricklayer and a farm laborer on the wheat plains of Kansas. After an interval spent at Lombard College in Galesburg, he became a hotel servant in Denver, then a coal-heaver in Omaha. He began his writing career as a journalist for the Chicago Daily News. Later, he wrote poetry, history, biographies, novels, children's literature, and film reviews. Sandburg also collected and edited books of ballads and folklore. He spent most of his life in the Midwest before moving to North Carolina.
Sandburg volunteered to go to the military and was stationed in Puerto Rico with the 6th Illinois Infantry during the Spanish-American War, disembarking at Guanica, Puerto Rico on July 25, 1898. Sandburg was never actually called to battle. He attended West Point for just two weeks, before failing mathematics and grammar exam. Sandburg returned to Galesburg and entered Lombard College, but left without a degree in 1903. He then moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and joined the Social Democratic Part, the by which the Socialist Party of America was known in the state. Sandburg served as a secretary to Emil Seidel, socialist mayor of Milwaukee from 1910 to 1912.
Sandburg met Lilian Steichen at the Social Democratic Party office in 1907, and they married the next year. Lilian's brother was the photographer Edward Steichen. Sandburg, with his wife, whom he called Paula, raised three daughters. The Sandburgs moved to Harbert, Michigan, and then to suburban Chicago, Illinois. They lived in Evanston, Illinois, before settling at 331 South York Street in Elmhurst, Illinois, from 1919 to 1930. During the time, Sandburg wrote Chicago Poems, Cornhuskers, and Smoke and Steel. In 1919, Sandburg won a Pulitzer Prize made possible by a special grant from the Poetry Society for his collection Cornhuskers. Sandburg also wrote three children's books in Elmhurst: Rootabaga Stories, Rootabaga Pigeons, and Potato Face. Sandburg also wrote Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, a two-volume biography.
The family moved to Michigan in 1930, and the Sandburg house at 331 South York Street in Elmhurst was demolished, and the site is now a parking lot. Sandburg won the 1940 Pulitzer Prize for History for "The War Years," the second volume of his Abraham Lincoln, and second Poetry Pulitzer in 1951 for "Complete Poems."
In 1945, he moved to Connemara, a 246-acre rural estate in Flat Rock, North Carolina. Here, he produced a little over a third of his total published work and lived with his wife, daughters, and two grandchildren.
On February 12, 1959, in commemorations of the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth, Congress met in joint session to hear actor Fredric March give a dramatic reading of the Gettysburg Address, followed by a speech by Sandburg. As of 2013, Sandburg remains the only American poet ever invited to address a joint session of Congress.
Sandburg supported the Civil Rights Movement and was the first white man to be honored by the NAACP with their Silver Plaque Award as a major prophet of civil rights in his time.
Sandburg died of natural causes in 1967; his ashes were interred under "Remembrance Rock", a granite boulder located behind his birth house.
Much of Carl Sandburg's poetry, such as "Chicago," focused on Chicago, Illinois, where he spent time as a reporter the Chicago Daily News and the Day Book. His most famous description of the city is as "hog butcher for the world/toolmaker, stacker of wheat/player with railroads and the Nation's Freight handler/stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders."
Sandburg earned Pulitzer Prizes for his collection "The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg", "Corn Huskers", and for his biography of Abraham Lincoln. He recorded excerpts from the biography and some of Lincoln's speeches for Caedmon Records in New York City in May 1957. He was awarded a Grammy Award in 1959 for Best Performance--Documentary or Spoken Word for his recording of Aaron Copland's "Lincoln Portrait" with the New York Philharmonic.
Sandburg is also remembered by generations of children for his "Rootabaga Stories" and "Rootabaga Pigeons", a series of whimsical, sometimes melancholy stories he originally created for his own daughters. The "Rootabaga Stories" were born of Sandburg's desire for "American Fairy Tales" to match American childhood. He felt that the European stories involving royalty and knights were inappropriate, and so populated his stories with skyscrapers, trains, corn fairies, and the "Five Marvelous Pretzels."
Comments
Post a Comment