Carl Sandburg's The People, Yes, Thirties modernism, and the problem of bad political poetry.(Critical Essay)

Publication: Texas Studies in Literature and Language

Publication Date: 22-JUN-04

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every cut in production cost should be shared with the consumers in lower prices with the workers in higher wages thus stabilizing buying power and guarding against recurrent collapses. "What is this? Is it economics, poetry, or what?" --Carl Sandburg, The People, Yes (267)

In September 1936, Archibald MacLeish published a review of Carl Sandburg's book-length poem The People, Yes in the leftist journal New Masses. MacLeish praises Sandburg as a political visionary:

The People, Yes ought to be required reading for every man in every American metropolis who thinks of himself as a radical.... It will teach him that the tradition of the people is not dead in this republic. It will teach him, further, that that tradition is the tradition upon which he must build if he wishes to build a social revolution which will succeed. (25)

The American masses, MacLeish explains, will not rise up until they are persuaded that revolutionary socialism has indigenous roots traceable back to 1776:

We hold in our hands the growing thing, the true shelter for a great people, and yet it will neither grow nor shelter until it is grafted to the green wood of the people's lives.... What [Sandburg] says to those who have attempted to spell the name of their own cause out of the cracked letters of the Liberty Bell is this: Why turn back? Why say the people were right then? Why not say the people are right still? ... He points out the one great tradition in American life strong enough and live enough to carry the revolution of the oppressed. That tradition is the belief in the people. (26; his emphasis)

MacLeish concludes his review with the ringing assertion that "the revolutionary party which can offer to restore the government to the people and which can convince the people of its sincerity in so offering ... will inherit the history of this country and change it into truth" (27).

Not once does MacLeish comment on Sandburg's poetry qua poetry. He includes five long quotations from The People, Yes, but he neither praises nor analyzes them. They serve simply to illustrate or advance his argument. A case in point: while discussing the perennial fear of the masses that American politicians have exhibited, he turns to Sandburg for a civics lesson:

Into the Constitution of the United States they wrote a fear In the form of "checks and balances," "proper restraints" On the people so whimsical and changeable, So variable in mood and weather ... (qtd. in MacLeish, 26)

Relying on Sandburg solely as an expert in politics, MacLeish evades the awkward duty of evaluating his technique. He does not have to draw attention, for instance, to the clumsy initial inversion ("Into the Constitution ... they wrote a fear"), nor to the quick, clotted accumulation of four nonparallel prepositional phrases ("Into ... In ... On ... in"). He overlooks both the verbiage (why use both "changeable" and "variable"?) and the stale metaphors (of course "weather" and "mood" are "variable"!). In short, MacLeish is guilty of a grievous sin, judged by the standards of such contemporary poetry reviewers as Stephen Burt, Nicholas Jenkins, Marjorie Perloff, and Helen Vendler. He lauds Sandburg's content while disregarding its form. (1)

What Explains MacLeish's Crassness?

MacLeish and Sandburg were writing at a moment when, as Cary Nelson has illustrated, the nature and function of modern poetry, and by extension the role of the literary critic, were still greatly contested. When the famous Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren textbook Understanding Poetry first appeared in 1938, its disparagement of the "poetry of social protest" was far from an opinion universally shared among intellectuals (Revolutionary, 64-65). Not until after World War II did it become received academic wisdom that technique, structure, diction, tone, and other formal aspects of poem are crucial in assigning its value, whereas its overt political and ethical commitments are of secondary importance. For those contemporary literary critics who wish to recover and celebrate the revolutionary leftist tradition in modern American poetry--scholars such as Nelson, Edward Brunner, Joseph Harrington, Walter Kalaidjian, and Michael Thurston--this 1940s and '50s academic consensus on what constitutes poetic merit represents the victory of an ostensibly apolitical formalism that in practice served to bolster a conservative, surveillancemad Cold War regime. The diverse, vibrant radical poetries of the 1930s, which once flourished in such publications as New Masses, Daily Worker, Contempo, and Anvil, disappeared almost completely from view, unable to measure up to newly orthodox standards to which they never sought to adhere in the first place.

Nelson and his colleagues have devised a two-prong strategy intended to convince skeptical modern poetry specialists that the Old Left produced more than "formally conservative, thematically monochromatic, and theoretically wooden" verse rightfully consigned to oblivion (Nelson, Repression, 102). On the one hand, this school holds that it is patently unjust for today's readers to judge 1930s politically radical art according to purportedly disinterested aesthetic criteria that were in fact originally and expressly instituted to devalue it. To "read noncanonical modern poetry fairly" means that one must "relearn how to read modern poetry" as well as rethink "the social meaning of a commitment to studying and disseminating literature" (Nelson, Revolutionary, 64; his emphasis). On the other hand, these critics are unwilling to do away with the aesthetic as a category altogether. They wish to argue that 1930s poetry by the likes of Sol Funaroff, Tillie Olsen, Lola Ridge, Edwin Rolfe, and Genevieve Taggard deserves study because we discover there different, differently grounded poetic virtues. As Nelson puts it, "understanding and evaluating noncanonical poems often requires a new and unfamiliar aesthetic vocabulary." One has to learn, for instance, to perceive value not in a poem's originality or autonomy but in its "contribution to a wider field of discourse," as when it "complicates or enhances a larger literary or historical dialogue" (164).

This two-front literary-critical battle--disparaging one slate of evaluative criteria while advocating another--has been met with stiff resistance. (2) After all, there are numerous twentieth-century poems with overt political content--among them W. B. Yeats's "September 1913," W. H. Auden's "September 1, 1939," Robert Hayden's "Middle Passage," Adrienne Rich's "Diving into the Wreck," and Thom Gunn's "The Man with Night Sweats"--that have stood up reasonably well to present-day, post-New Critical demands for formal sophistication. Furthermore, when Nelson attentively, lovingly analyzes Langston Hughes's "Christ in America" or when Michael Thurston elucidates Edwin Rolfe's "First Love," they demonstrate how steeped they are in the tradition of close reading that they wish to call into question. (3) Yes, elsewhere they discuss and defend a range of noncanonical and ephemeral verse, much of which would never reward explication de texte, but their residual faith in the usefulness of the aesthetic as a rubric--however qualified or rearticulated--and their periodic deployment of the very interpretive tools that they wish to historicize and problematize--leaves them open to repeated, unwelcome objections that they perversely defend poetry that they couldn't really like all that much. Harvey Teres, for example, accuses Walter Kalaidjian of a "betrayal of his own skills as a reader honed over the course of many years" when he labels "inflated doggerel" such as Jack Haynes's "Scottsboro Boys Chant" "elegant and witty" (181).

When studying or discussing politicized poetry from the 1930s the problem of evaluation does almost inevitably arise--but it does not have to take the form of a struggle over its relative merits vis-a-vis canonical, mainline modernism. Such disputes have been productive, but they also tend to tilt over into sterile exchanges of the epithets "elitist" and "propagandist." This article proposes a different approach to the problem of evaluation: an inquiry into (overt, covert, or unintended) reasons why a 1930s poet might depart from standards for poetic accomplishment current then and now. The verse in Carl Sandburg's The People, Yes is, it must be confessed, rather egregious. Egregious, though, not only when held up to the standards of, say, Seamus Heaney or Jorie Graham, but also, crucially, when measured by a pre-World War II audience's sense of what lyric poetry should be. Yes, Sandburg's language is degraded, demotic, clunky. So too, he would reply, is public language itself. Fighting for a subjective space apart from the pervasive, invasive discourses of the media and the market is a pyrrhic battle. Poetry, if it is to be modern, progressive, and redemptive, must first immerse itself in the tawdry discourse-world of industrial capitalism's cultural correlatives, Hollywood, the radio serial, and Madison Avenue.

Carl Sandburg's The People, Yes is a prime candidate for illustrating this dynamic, not least because it lacks the romantic allure of much 1930s political poetry. Sandburg was a national celebrity, a New Dealer, and a friend to presidents. Recovering his participation in the "rich cultural moment" of the 1930s may add to the "narrative depth and alternative meaning" that are lacking in treatments of the period in most "major surveys of modern poetry," but one does not come away with the thrill of championing a forgotten yet ideologically pure martyr to the cause of labor (Nelson, Revolutionary, 61). Hence, there are fewer sentimental and political barriers to conceding the thoroughgoing badness of Sandburg's book. Poetry critics, whatever their party affiliations, can agree that The People, Yes is eerily mediocre--relentlessly so, over several hundred pages. This agreement permits one to see that the text solicits such an evaluation, only then to teach that such evaluative thinking is misguided. What matters is not taste per se but rather the structuration of thought that precedes and governs it, a patterning that in turn depends upon an economic substrate. The "people" will only free themselves once they cease thinking of themselves as individuals, set aside their arbitrary personal preferences, and take reification to an extreme by uniting as a faceless mass. The people, empowered as a collective, will then "march." Sandburg reveals to us the hard--potentially repellent--truth that successful socialist revolution would require a paradoxical embrace of our alienated condition. Until we are just cogs in the machine, he ambivalently informs us, there can be no machine with the traction and power to overturn to the present unjust order.

Who Was Carl Sandburg?

Carl Sandburg occupies a curious position in American literary history. He enjoys a celebrity status in American culture comparable to the likes of Robert Frost and Norman Rockwell. His prizewinning biographies of Abraham Lincoln, his earnest portrayals of Midwestern life, and his Rootabaga stories for children have combined in the popular imagination to grant him the image of a benign, plainspoken, apple-pie-wholesome sage. His picture appeared on the covers of Life (1938) and Time (1939); Bette Davis starred in a stage show celebrating his life and works; and he was a friend and correspondent of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson, and John F. Kennedy. (4) Poems such as "Chicago" and "Fog" remain fixtures in high school English classes, and Connemara, his two hundred sixty-four acre North Carolina ranch, is a National Historic Site that has become a national place of pilgrimage. According to the federal government, 34,617 people visited it in fiscal year 2001. (5)

Sandburg's popular appeal has not translated into enduring academic respect. The last twenty years have seen a surprising paucity of work on his writing. There has been one comprehensive biography--Penelope Niven's Carl Sandburg (1991)--one substantial book-length study--Philip Yannella's The Other Carl Sandburg (1996)--a recent study of Sandburg's literary milieu--Lisa Woolley's American Voices of the Chicago Renaissance (2000)--and a handful of articles. (6) This meager showing cannot begin to compare to the literary-critical industries that have grown up around such other American modernists as Hart Crane, H. D., T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams.

This list of secondary materials also displays a pronounced bias toward a single phase in Sandburg's long career, the years 1915-20. During that short span Sandburg published his best-known volumes of verse: Chicago Poems (1916), Cornhuskers (1918), and Smoke and Steel (1920). He was also more conspicuously involved in radical leftist politics than after-wards. From 1915-18 he published forty-one pieces in the Chicago-based International Socialist Review that showed his ardent support for "the direct-action revolutionary tactics of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)" (Yannella, xiv). Moreover, as a foreign correspondent...

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