Poets & People

POEMS OF PEOPLE--Edgar Lee Masters --Appleton-Century ($2.50).

THE PEOPLE, YES--Carl Sandburg-- Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

Twenty years ago two gifted free-verse _ poets who became prominent at about the same time were widely hailed as among the most original spirits in the emerging group of Midwestern writers. Two more dissimilar talents have seldom been found in the same school. Edgar Lee Masters was a gruff, hardbitten, Kansas-born lawyer whose poems were bitter epitaphs on the wasted lives of a small town. Carl Sandburg, cheerful, intuitive, sentimental, had worked as a porter in a barber shop, sceneshifter in a theatre, truck-handler in a brickyard, a dishwasher, harvest hand, Social-Democratic Party organizer, newspaperman. As Edgar Lee Masters followed Spoon River Anthology with poems cut in the same pattern, but increasingly dry and progressively longer, Sandburg followed Chicago Poems with his songs of labor in Smoke and Steel, with tributes to the physical beauty of the U. S. in Slabs of the Sunburnt West.

Both poets turned to prose at about the same period, Sandburg writing his colloquial children's tales, Rootabaga Stories, Masters his cycle of thesis novels. Both wrote biographies of Lincoln, Sandburg picturing him as the greatest U. S. hero, Masters seeing him as the wrecker of the Union. Last week these two poets signalized their return to verse with volumes of tributes to the people. Saluting them for different reasons, each had a different crowd in mind.

To most readers, there is likely to be no question as to which has made the happier choice of subject. In Poems of People Edgar Lee Masters lapsed into stock poetic attitudes in writing of Washington at Fraunces' Tavern, Jefferson, Martin Van Buren, Daniel Boone, De Soto. Only in Andrew Jackson does he carry out the promise of his title, calling up

The People hungry, ignorant, despoiled; The People in want, however much they toiled; The People smelling, cockeyed and crazy.

who entered the White House with Jackson, where "they all drank cider." The People, Yes is a 286-page volume in which no such signs of aloofness are apparent. As Sandburg's most ambitious poetic venture, it has little in common with the fragmentary, glancing, impressionist verses that won him his reputation, stands superior to them in originality and wit. One of the chief critical charges brought against Sandburg has been that he lacked an integrated philosophy that would guide his writing, that his poems have too frequently been mere expressions of moods, descriptions of street and industrial scenes, echoes of stray opinions overheard in crowds. As a poet he has been like a radio tuned in on several stations at once, getting bits of preaching, bits of political talk, bits of good music, bits of the chattering, discordant static of U. S. urban life. These several voices he has never before fused into a program that made sense or symmetry. With The People, Yes, he comes close to doing so, and the book narrowly misses a place with the best of U. S. poetry. Written with a deceptive informality, packed with native phrases and examples of fresh, unstudied, lower-class humor, it succeeds in making "the people" a hero worth a poet's tribute.

In part it is a treasury of common sayings: "Don't expect too much." . .-"How can you compete with a skunk?" . . .

"Some pretty good men are on the street." . . . "You can't convict a million dollars." Sometimes Sandburg brings in more conventional proverbs to contrast with nuggets of contemporary wisdom. Sometimes he merely lists ordinary, everyday greetings to suggest the breezy friendliness of his hero: Where you been so long? What good wind blew you in? These themes are interspaced with examples of native folklore that range from Ford jokes to the classic rural replies to smart city salesmen, from variations on "No Credit" signs to examples of the tall tales of Paul Bunyan and Mike Fink. The first sections of The People, Yes deal with the poetry and sardonic humor of the people: The old-timer on the desert was gray and grizzled with ever seeing the sun: "For myself I don't care whether it rains.

I've seen it rain.

But I'd like to have it rain pretty soon sometime.

Then my son could see it.

He's never seen it rain." . . .

Another baby in Cleveland, Ohio, in Cuyahoga County, Ohio-- why did she ask: "Papa, what is the moon supposed to advertise?" . . .

The man hardly ever marries the woman he jokes about: she often marries the man she laughs at. Keep your eyes open before marriage,

half-shut afterward. . . .

Out of this welter of jokes, proverbs, signs, schoolboy howlers, stories, wisecracks, the character of the people gradually emerges, hardbitten, hardworking, unaffected, forever asking two great questions that set the theme of the book: "Where to? What next?" Sandburg puts down with equal approbation a catalog of the casual heroisms of everyday work, the hazards of steelmaking, of mining, of railroading. He records the last words of a wireless operator on a sinking ship ("This is no night to be out without an umbrella!") and the names of railroads: The Delay Linger and Wait is the D. L. & W., the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western.

He puts down the sardonic comments on tall tales: "Go on, I'm listening." . . . "Aw shut up, close your trap, button your tongue, you talk too much." He lists the common exaggerations that are so common their mockery is seldom heard:

So slick he was his feet slipped out from under him.

The ground flew up and hit him in the face.

Brilliantly as Sandburg has captured the flavor of unrecorded wisecracks, most readers will find The People, Yes growing diffuse as the poet approaches his climax and speaks in his own idiom instead of that of his hero. He repeats with love Abe Lincoln's salty observations on the poor, sees Lincoln as one of the people elevated to power who never forgot his origins. He repeats with scorn Hamilton's "Your people, sir, is a great beast." Brooding on unemployment, hard times, strikes, revolutions, wars, he sees the people succumbing to one false leader after another, tricked and sold and again sold, learning slowly, always asking, "Where to? What next?" And he hears a lament of the poor that is unique among all the songs of poverty that other poets have heard: "/ earn my living. I make enough to get by. . . ."

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