Carl (August) Sandburg was born of Swedish stock at Galesburg, Illinois, January 6, 1878. His schooling was haphazard; at thirteen he went to work on a milk wagon. During the next six years he was, in rapid succession, porter in a barber-shop, scene-shifter in a cheap theatre, truck-handler in a brickyard, turner apprentice in a pottery, dish-washer in Denver and Omaha hotels, harvest hand in Kansas wheat fields. These tasks equipped him, as no amount of learning could have done, to be the laureate of industrial America. When war with Spain was declared in 1898, Sandburg, avid for fresh adventure, enlisted in Company C., Sixth Illinois Volunteers.

On his return from the campaign in Porto Rico, Sandburg entered Lombard College in Galesburg and, for the first time, began to think in terms of literature. He had already seen a great deal of the world from the roaring alleys of great cities as well as from the underside of box-cars; he had loafed, fought and expressed himself richly. So, what with the fact that the “terrible Swede,” as captain of the basket-ball team, won a series of new victories, it is little wonder that he was idolized by his class-mates and elected editor-in-chief of the college paper.

After leaving college he did all manner of things to earn a living. He was advertising manager for a department store and worked as district organizer for the Social-Democratic party of Wisconsin. He became a salesman, a pamphleteer, a newspaperman. On the staff of a business magazine, he became a “safety first” expert; his articles on accident prevention bringing him before manufacturers’ conventions where he talked about machinery safeguards and methods found successful in reducing injuries in factory organizations.

In 1904, Sandburg published the proverbial “slender sheaf”; a tiny pamphlet of twenty-two poems, uneven in quality but strangely like the work of the mature Sandburg in feeling. What is more, these experiments anticipated the very inflection of the later poems, with their spiritual kinship to Henley, Lincoln and Whitman; several of these early experiments (with the exception of the rhymed verses) might be placed, without seeming incongruous, in the most recent collection of Sandburg’s pieces. The idiom of Smoke and Steel (1920) is more intensified, but it is the same idiom as that of “Milville” (1903), which begins:

Meanwhile the newspaperman was having a hard struggle to keep the poet alive. Until he was thirty-six years old, Sandburg was totally unknown to the literary world. In 1914 a group of his poems appeared in Poetry; A Magazine of Verse; later the same year one of the group (the now famous “Chicago”) was awarded the Levinson prize of two hundred dollars. A little more than a year later his first, full-fledged book was published, and Sandburg—tardily but triumphantly—had arrived.

Chicago Poems (1916) is full of ferment; it seethes with a direct poetry surcharged with tremendous energy. Here is an almost animal exultation that is also an exaltation. Sandburg’s speech is simple and powerful; he uses slang as freely (and beautifully) as his predecessors used the now archaic tongue of their times. (See Preface.) Immediately the cries of protest were heard: Sandburg was coarse and brutal; his work ugly and distorted; his language, unrefined, unfit for poetry. His detractors forgot that Sandburg was only brutal when dealing with brutality; that beneath his toughness, he was one of the tenderest of living poets; that, when he used colloquialisms and a richly metaphorical slang, he was searching for new poetic values in “limber, lasting, fierce words”—unconsciously answering Whitman who asked, “Do you suppose the liberties and brawn of These States have to do only with delicate lady-words? With gloved gentleman-words?”

Cornhuskers (1918) is another step forward; it is fully as sweeping as its forerunner and far more sensitive. The gain in power and restraint is evident in the very first poem, a magnificent panoramic vision of the prairie. Here is something of the surge of a Norse saga; Cornhuskers is keen with a salty vigor, a vast sympathy for all that is splendid and terrible in Nature. But the raw violence is restrained to the point of mysticism. There are, in this volume, dozens of those delicate perceptions of beauty that must astonish those who think that Sandburg can write only a big-fisted, rough-neck sort of poetry. “Cool Tombs,” one of the most poignant lyrics of our time, moves with a new music; “Grass” whispers as quietly as the earlier “Fog” stole in on stealthy, cat feet.

Smoke and Steel (1920) is the synthesis and sublimation of its predecessors. In this ripest of his collections, Sandburg has fused mood, accent and image in a new intensity. It is a fit setting for the title-poem; it is, in spite of certain over-mystical accents, an epic of industrialism. Smoke-belching chimneys are here, quarries and great boulders of iron-ribbed rock; here are titanic visions: the dreams of men and machinery. And silence is here—the silence of sleeping tenements and sun-soaked cornfields. Smoke and Steel is a rich amalgam; indigenous to the core. And what makes it so vital is Sandburg’s own spirit: a never-sated joy in existence, a continually fresh delight in the variety and wonder of life.