Carl Sandburg, the poet and an urban folk singer, was born 137 years ago. Sandburg won three Pulitzer Prizes, two for his poetry and one for his biography of Abraham Lincoln. H. L. Mencken called Sandburg indubitably an American in every pulse-beat. Sandburg was born in the three-room cottage at 313 East Third Street in Galesburg, Illinois, to parents of Swedish ancestry. At the age of thirteen, he left school and began driving a milk wagon. From the age of about fourteen until he was seventeen or eighteen, he worked as a porter at the Union Hotel barbershop in Galesburg. After that he was on the milk route again for eighteen months. He became a bricklayer and a farm laborer on the wheat plains of Kansas. After an interval spent at Lombard College in Galesburg, he became a hotel servant in Denver, then a coal-heaver in Omaha. He began his writing career as a journalist for the Chicago Daily News. Later he wrote poetry, history, biographies, novels, childrens literature and film reviews. Sandburg also collected and edited books of ballads and folklore. He spent most of his life in the Midwest before moving to North Carolina. Sandburg volunteered to go to the military and was stationed in Puerto Rico with the 6th Illinois Infantry during the Spanish–American War, disembarking at Guánica, Puerto Rico on July 25, 1898. Sandburg was never actually called to battle. He attended West Point for just two weeks, before failing a mathematics and grammar exam. Sandburg returned to Galesburg and entered Lombard College, but left without a degree in 1903. He moved to Milwaukee and joined the Social Democratic Party, the name by which the Socialist Party of America was known in the state. Sandburg served as a secretary to Emil Seidel, socialist mayor of Milwaukee from 1910 to 1912. Sandburg met Lilian Steichen at the Social Democratic Party office in 1907, and they married the next year. Lilians brother was the photographer Edward Steichen. Sandburg with his wife, whom he called Paula, raised three daughters. The Sandburgs moved to Harbert, Michigan, and then to suburban Chicago. They lived in Evanston, Illinois, before settling at 331 S. York Street in Elmhurst, Illinois, from 1919 to 1930. Sandburg wrote three childrens books in Elmhurst — Rootabaga Stories, in 1922, followed by Rootabaga Pigeons (1923) and Potato Face (1930). Sandburg also wrote Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, a two-volume biography in 1926, The American Songbag (1927), and a book of poems called Good Morning, America (1928) in Elmhurst. In 1919, Sandburg won a Pulitzer Prize made possible by a special grant from The Poetry Society for his collection Corn Huskers. He won the 1940 Pulitzer Prize for History for The War Years, the second volume of his Abraham Lincoln, and a second Poetry Pulitzer in 1951 for Complete Poems. In 1945, he moved to Connemara, a 246-acre rural estate in Flat Rock, North Carolina. Here he produced a little over a third of his total published work, and lived with his wife, daughters and two grandchildren. On February 12, 1959, in commemorations of the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincolns birth, Congress met in joint session to hear actor Fredric March give a dramatic reading of the Gettysburg Address, followed by an address by Sandburg. Sandburg remains the only American poet ever invited to address a joint session of Congress. Sandburg supported the civil rights movement, and was the first white man to be honored by the NAACP with their Silver Plaque Award, proclaiming him to be a major prophet of civil rights in our time. Sandburg died of natural causes in 1967; his ashes were interred under Remembrance Rock, a granite boulder located behind his birth house. Sandburgs 1927 anthology, the American Songbag, enjoyed enormous popularity, going through many editions; and Sandburg himself was perhaps the first American urban folk singer, accompanying himself on solo guitar at lectures and poetry recitals, and in recordings, long before the first or the second folk revival movements (of the 1940s and 1960s, respectively). According to musicologist Judith Tick: As a populist poet, Sandburg bestowed a powerful dignity on what the 20s called the American scene in a book he called a ragbag of stripes and streaks of color from nearly all ends of the earth ... rich with the diversity of the United States. Reviewed widely in journals ranging from the New Masses to Modern Music, the American Songbag influenced a number of musicians. Pete Seeger, who calls it a landmark, saw it almost as soon as it came out. The composer Elie Siegmeister took it to Paris with him in 1927, and he and his wife Hannah were always singing these songs. That was home. That was where we belonged. Sandburgs 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 Sandburgs birthplace of Galesburg, Illinois. Here, Sandburg performs “I Ride An Old Paint” in 1938.
Posted on: Tue, 06 Jan 2015 10:23:26 +0000
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