Nathan "N.R." Gaddis’s Reviews > Something Said > Status Update

what's his reasoning? Sandburg's always seemed to me, and I've read a good # of his poems, pretty darn American.

Eric wrote: "what's his reasoning? Sandburg's always seemed to me, and I've read a good # of his poems, pretty darn American."

I don't see any piece dedicated to Sandburg in this volume, but the Frost/Sandburg whipping boy role passes through much of the book. In contrast, William Carlos Williams is a guiding piece of what real American poetry looks like. Don't ask me though cuz I don't know poetry past "I wandered through the woods and chose one of two paths" or however it goes. Here's the opening of the essay on Moore:

"It is instructive to note that the three elder poets that this country has taken to its heart are almost wholly ignorant of the reality of living in this country. Carl Sandburg, who wrote an amorphous verse that dealt with solved, or at least dormant, social situations which his work proffered as problem; Robert Frost, who brought a nineteenth-century Anglo-European sensibility to bear on a postcard America toward which he felt proprietary; and the subject of this note, Marianne Moore, who invented an America of 'old values' from which she chose inoffensive subjects--the lovable, slightly crotchety, and eccentric old aunt.
"America is maddening because it is vital--perhaps manically so--in its terminal madness, which must dat from the beginning of World War I. American writers, the best of them, have busied themselves piercing to the hear of this strangely electric, though moribund activity, piercing the layers of hypocrisy and filth we are daily presented with as truth. But Miss Moore has never looked beneath the first layer, because what is there is ugly, corrupt, and filled with the kind of life and turmoil that eccentricity cannot grapple with. She has eschewed the reality of the American experience in favor of what she will believe is the American experience, and in the process she has sealed herself off from her secret heart."

And it goes on. But in general, me knowing nothing about poems, many of his pieces collected here have the same kind of agenda in regard to poetry as I have in regard to prose works and novels. Lots of forgotten great poets apparently.

And I think I posted this for Jacob yesterday, but it might be of interest for you too Eric, re: Sandburg's poetry [I've not read it, so as with all things poetic, "Not my fault!" eTc.]

"A Workingman's Poet"
By Danny Heitman, HUMANITIES, March/April 2013

http://www.neh.gov/humanities/2013/ma...