American Troubadour

It could be, in the grace of God, that I shall live to be 89, as did Hokusai, and speaking my farewell to earthly scenes, I might paraphrase: "If God had let me live five years longer, I should have been a writer."

Carl Sandburg did not need the ex tra five years. When he died last week at 89 -- the same age as the early 19th century Japanese painter -- on his goat farm near Flat Rock, N.C., he was solidly established as a poet and historian.

Above all, he was a minstrel whose prose had the same resonating, twanging rhythms as his folk songs or his verse. Essentially, Carl Sandburg was an American troubadour.

"Family of Man." The nation he sang was the bustling, brawling Amer ica of his Midwestern youth, a land of laborers, slaughterhouses and prairies.

Along with its music and anecdotal flow, his verse had the Whitmanesque "barbaric yawp," as in "Chicago" ("Hog butcher of the world"). Sandburg could also lilt a form of American haiku:

The fog comes On little cat feet.

He loved yarns, slang and "the people of the earth, the family of man."

For Sandburg, the head of the family was Abraham Lincoln, who embodied the qualities that the poet so greatly admired, and in some measure possessed: honesty, wit, an unpretentious and even awkward eloquence. For 15 years, Sandburg labored on his monumental six-volume biography of Lincoln. He won a Pulitzer prize for the Lincoln books in 1940, another for his Collected Poems in 1951.

"Ear Wigglings." For all the popularity of his works, Sandburg never fared well in academe. Critic Edmund Wilson observed of the Lincoln biography: "There are moments when one is tempted to feel that the crudest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth was to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg." A kind of pseudo-folksy affectation came into some of Sandburg's work. Such criticism never troubled the poet. He was an old-fashioned storyteller, and when an interviewer once mentioned modern poetry, Sandburg snorted: "I say to hell with the new poetry. Sometimes I think it's a series of ear wigglings."

Sandburg grew up in Galesburg, Ill., where his Swedish father was a railroad worker. He quit school at 13, hopped a westbound freight at 17 to see the land he was to celebrate. Later Galesburg's Lombard College accepted him on the basis of a special qualifying examination. After studying there for nearly four years, he hoboed in the East, then became a newspaper reporter, a vocation he pursued on and off as a correspondent and columnist for Chicago dailies until 1945.

In 1914, Harriet Monroe's Poetry magazine published "Chicago," and Sandburg was recognized as a raw new

U.S. talent. His collection of Chicago Poems appeared in 1916, followed by Cornhuskers, Smoke and Steel and six other volumes. His talents were diverse, and almost inexhaustible. In 1927 he completed a labor of love, his American Songbag, a treasury of the nation's folk songs. His first novel, Remembrance Rock, was finished in 1948. At 74, he published Always the Young Strangers, a memoir of his boyhood. Always, however, his first love was verse and song. As a preface to 1928's Good Morning, America, Sandburg listed 38 tentative definitions of poetry. Among them: "Poetry is a sliver of the moon lost in the belly of a golden frog."

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