Description
When Illinois-born Carl Sandburg was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1951, it was the crowning achievement of his nearly half century career as a poet. At the time he was one of America's most popular living poets. His work embodied the American experience and spoke deeply to the hearts of the very people who inspired his greatest poems. For them Sandburg symbolized America's innate integrity and bound-less promise.
This volume contains the poems upon which Sandburg built his reputation and career. The four poems selected from his rarely reprinted first col-lection, In Reckless Ecstasy, provide a fascinating glimpse into his developing talent. They show him slowly breaking free of traditional verse forms toward his own unique voice.
His next book, the groundbreaking Chicago Poems, presents Sandburg at what many believe to be his best. This volume revealed a daring new style of free verse to the American literary com-munity. To convey realistically the city of Chicago and its people in poetry, his language reflected the speech and slang of its inhabitants. This gave his poems a striking authenticity, humor, and vitality. It also offended many critics who preferred a more genteel verse. They voiced doubts about whether Sandburg's "vulgar" writings could even be called poetry. Nevertheless, Sandburg's significance and influence as an innovator of American poetry was evident, and poems like "Chicago," "Fog," and "To a Contemporary Bunkshooter" became classics.
The eminent critic Malcolm Cowley once observed that Carl Sandburg "turned the Mid-western voice into a sort of music." Indeed, he transformed the lives of ordinary American men and women into a poetry that possesses a won-derful clarity and a truly authentic tone.
