Carl Sandburg
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Carl August Sandburg (January 6, 1878 - July 22, 1967) was an American poet, historian, novelist, balladeer and folklorist. He was born in Galesburg, Illinois of Swedish parents and died in Flat Rock, North Carolina.
H. L. Mencken called Carl Sandburg "indubitably an American in every pulse-beat." He was a successful journalist, poet, historian, biographer, and autobiographer. During the course of his career, Sandburg won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for his biography of Abraham Lincoln (Abraham Lincoln: The War Years) and one for his collection The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg.
Much of his poetry, such as "Chicago", focused on Chicago, Illinois, where he spent time as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News and the Day Book. His most famous description of the city is as "Hog Butcher for the World/Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat/Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler,/Stormy, Husky, Brawling, City of the Big Shoulders."
During the Spanish-American War, Sandburg enlisted in the 6th Illinois Infantry. Following a brief (two-week) career as a student at West Point with Douglas MacArthur, Sandburg chose to attend Lombard College. Sandburg left college without a degree in 1902 and got married to Lillian Steichen, sister of the famed photographer, Edward Steichen, in 1908. Lillian (nicknamed "Paus'l" by her mother and "Paula" by Carl) and Carl had three daughters. From 1912 to 1928, he lived in Chicago, nearby Evanston and Elmhurst. During this time he began work on his series of biographies on Abraham Lincoln, which would eventually earn him his Pulitzer Prize in history (for Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, 1940). Sandburg lived for a brief period in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, before moving to Harbert, Michigan. It was also during his years in the Chicago area and Milwaukee that Sandburg was a member of the Social Democratic Party and took a strong interest in the socialist community. In 1945, the Sandburg family moved from the Midwest, where they'd spent most of their lives, to the Connemara estate, in Flat Rock, North Carolina. Connemara was ideal for the family, as it gave Mr. Sandburg an entire mountain top to roam and enough solitude for him to write. It also provided Mrs. Sandburg over 30 acres of pasture to raise and graze her prize-winning dairy goats.
He is also beloved 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 Marrrrvelous Pretzels".
His home of 22 years in Flat Rock, Henderson County, North Carolina is preserved by the National Park Service as the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site. Carl Sandburg College is located in Sandburg's birthplace of Galesburg, Illinois. The Rare Book and Special Collections Library at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign possesses the Carl Sandburg collection and archives. The bulk of the collection was purchased directly from Carl Sandburg and his family, with many smaller collections having been donated by his family and purchased from outside sources.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sandburg
Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)
Bronzes
I
1THE bronze General Grant riding a bronze horse in Linc-
oln Park
2Shrivels in the sun by day when the motor cars whirr
by in long processions going somewhere to keep ap-
pointment for dinner and matineés and buying and
selling
3Though in the dusk and nightfall when high waves are
piling
4On the slabs of the promenade along the lake shore near
by
5 I have seen the general dare the combers come closer
6And make to ride his bronze horse out into the hoofs
and guns of the storm.
II
7I cross Lincoln Park on a winter night when the snow
is falling.
8Lincoln in bronze stands among the white lines of snow,
his bronze forehead meeting soft echoes of the new-
sies crying forty thousand men are dead along the
Yser, his bronze ears listening to the mumbled roar
of the city at his bronze feet.
9A lithe Indian on a bronze pony, Shakespeare seated with
long legs in bronze, Garibaldi in a bronze cape, they
hold places in the cold, lonely snow to-night on their
pedestals and so they will hold them past midnight
and into the dawn.
Notes
1] General Grant: Ulysses S. Grant (1822-85), commander general of the victorious union armies in the American civil war, and 18th President of the United States.
Lincoln Park. 19th-century English style rolling park along 5 miles of Chicago's lakefront.
5] combers: curling waves.
8] the Yser: river flowing through France and Belgium into the South Sea.
9] Garibaldi: Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807-82), revolutionary leader in the liberation and unification of Italy under King Victor Emmanuel in 1861.
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