Of Thee I Sing

COMPLETE POEMS (676 pp.) -- Carl Sandburg--Harcourt, Brace ($6).

Carl Sandburg did pretty well at West Point--for a poet. He lasted two weeks.* He failed in arithmetic and grammar and now, 50 years later, in the preface to his fat Complete Poems he admits that he is "still studying verbs and the mystery of how they connect nouns," and adds, "I am more suspicious of adjectives than at any other time in all my born days." On the subject of poetic form, form-scorning Poet Sandburg is a more primitive, less useful guide. Example:

Has not the square stood up and publicly called the circle a sonofabitch because of animosities induced by the inevitable mutual contradictions of form?

Complete Poems is one of the most massive monuments to uninhibited formlessness in all literature.The quality marks the first poem on the first page, Sandburg's famous Chicago, published in 1915:

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:

The same quality persists to the final lines of the last poem, Anywhere and Everywhere People:

Could it be there are people who have

never been seen anywhere and they ask people who have

been seen everywhere, "How does it feel to be

seen everywhere?"

Of all major U.S. literary figures, Sandburg, during a long productive life, has developed least as a writer, changed least as a man. His poetry, dredged raw from the look and experience of "the people," is from start to finish a shrewd, tender, cantankerous and lovingly slangy impressionist folk-portrait. Even his monumental biography, Abraham Lincoln, ungainly and near-noble, is a research-buttressed prose poem to a people's hero and many of its cadenced passages are as good poetry as Sandburg has ever written. Most modern poets use a language so private that it divorces them from all but their private claques. Sandburg, as close to the crowd as chewing gum and the corner beer joint, has spoken in the crowd's lingo from the start:

When the lawyers are through

What is there left, Bob?

Can a mouse nibble at it

And find enough to fasten a tooth in?

Why does a hearse horse snicker Hauling a lawyer away?

Sandburg's love for the people is as genuine as his love for nickel stogies, but it never attains poetic passion and it is shrouded in pessimism more often than it is clothed in hope. At best he sees a murky, half-formed potential:

The people is a tragic and comic two-face: hero and hoodlum: phantom and

gorilla twisting to moan with a gargoyle mouth: "They buy me and sell me . . . it's a game . . . sometime I'll break loose . . ."

If Sandburg, as Critic H. L. Mencken guessed 20 years ago, has the best chance for immortality of any contemporary U.S. writer, it is not because he has written with the moving beauty or the condensed, quietly explosive intuition of Fellow Poet Robert Frost. His Complete Poems is one great song-story about the look of the U.S. and its ordinary men & women, their faces humorous, quizzical, mildly cynical, usually work-smudged. It is a song with good swinging rhythms, but the tune is hard to remember and after hearing it all night only the mood remains in the morning.

Sandburg is the closest thing to a true wandering minstrel that U.S. song and poetry has had. Like most minstrels he is short on intellectual penetration, long on sympathy and human curiosity. Wherever he goes, he talks to people: Where do they come from, how are things generally, what do they think of this & that? As he talks, likely as not, he reaches into his pants pockets for the butt of a cigar he hasn't yet gotten his money's worth from.

At 72, Sandburg is living the life he loves on a 240-acre goat farm near Flat Rock, N. C. Why goats? Because "goats are cleaner and more profitable than horses and cows. And they don't dirty up your parlor."

* Among those in his class ('03) who finished the course: Douglas MacArthur.

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