Reviews for Carl Sandburg: Selected Poems

The average rating for Carl Sandburg: Selected Poems based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-02-24 00:00:00 Jonathan Bierner From Chicago Poems (1916)... By day the skyscraper looms in the smoke and sun and has a soul. Prairie and valley, streets of the city, pour people into it and they mingle among its twenty floors and are poured out again back to the streets, prairies and valleys. It is the men and women, boys and girls so poured in and out all day that give the building a soul of dreams and thoughts and memories. (Dumped in the sea or fixed in a desert, who would care for the building or speak its name or ask a policeman the way to it?) Elevators slide on their cables and tubes catch letters and parcels and iron pipes carry gas and water in and sewage out. Wires climb with secrets, carry light and carry words, and tell terrors and profits and loves--curses of men grappling plans of business and questions of women in plots of love. Hour by hour the caissons reach down to the rock of the earth and hold the building to a turning planet. Hour by hour the girders play as ribs and reach out and hold together the stone walls and floors. Hour by hour the hand of the mason and the stuff of the mortar clinch the pieces and parts to the shape an architect voted. Hour by hour the sun and the rain, the air and the rust, and the press of time running into centuries, play on the building inside and out and use it. Men who sunk the pilings and mixed the mortar are laid in graves where the wind whistles a wild song without words And so are men who strung the wires and fixed the pipes and tubes and those who saw it rise floor by floor. Souls of them all are here, even the hod carrier begging at back doors hundreds of miles away and the brick-layer who went to state's prison for shooting another man while drunk. (One man fell from a girder and broke his neck at the end of a straight plunge--he is here--his soul has gone into the stones of the building.) On the office doors from tier to tier--hundreds of names and each name standing for a face written across with a dead child, a passionate lover, a driving ambition for a million dollar business or a lobster's ease of life. Behind the signs on the doors they work and the walls tell nothing from room to room. Ten-dollar-a-week stenographers take letters from corporation officers, lawyers, efficiency engineers, and tons of letters go bundled from the building to all ends of the earth. Smiles and tears of each office girl go into the soul of the building just the same as the master-men who rule the building. Hands of clocks turn to noon hours and each floor empties its men and women who go away and eat and come back to work. Toward the end of the afternoon all work slackens and all jobs go slower as the people feel day closing on them. One by one the floors are emptied. . . The uniformed elevator men are gone. Pails clang. . . Scrubbers work, talking in foreign tongues. Broom and water and mop clean from the floors human dust and spit, and machine grime of the day. Spelled in electric fire on the roof are words telling miles of houses and people where to buy a thing for money. The sign speaks till midnight. Darkness on the hallways. Voices echo. Silence holds. . . Watchmen walk slow from floor to floor and try the doors. Revolvers bulge from their hip pockets. . . Steel safes stand in corners. Money is stacked in them. A young watchman leans at a window and sees the lights of barges butting their way across a harbor, nets of red and white lanterns in a railroad yard, and a span of glooms splashed with lines of white and blurs of crosses and clusters over the sleeping city. By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars and has a soul. - Skyscraper, pg. 19-21 From Cornhuskers (1918)... I too have a garret of old playthings. I have tin soldiers with broken arms upstairs. I have a wagon and the wheels gone upstairs. I have guns and a drum, a jumping-jack and a magic lantern. And dust is on them and I never look at them upstairs. I too have a garret of old playthings. - Upstairs, pg. 65 From Smoke and Steel (1920)... There will be a rusty gun on the wall, sweetheart, The rifle grooves curling with flakes of rust. A spider will make a silver string nest in the darkest, warmest corner of it. The trigger and the range-finder, they too will be rusty. And no hands will polish the gun, and it will hang on the wall. Forefingers and thumbs will point casually toward it. It will be spoken among half-forgotten, whished-to-be-forgotten things. They will tell the spider: Go on, you're doing good work. - A.E.F., pg. 87-88 From Slabs of the Sunburnt West (1922)... 1 Roll open this rug; a minx is in it; see her toe wiggling; roll open the rug; she is a runaway; or somebody is trying to steal her; here she is; here's your minx; how can we have a play unless we have this minx? 2 The child goes out in the storm stage thunder; "erring daughter, never darken this door-sill again"; the tender parents speak their curse; the child puts a few knick-knacks in a handkerchief; and the child goes; the door closes and the child goes; she is out now, in the storm on the stage, out forever; snow, you son-of-a-gun, snow, turn on the snow. - Props, pg. 116 From Good Morning, America (1928)... The green bug sleeps in the white lily ear. The red bug sleeps in the white magnolia. Shiny wings, you are choosers of colour. You have taken your summer bungalows wisely. - Small Homes, pg. 119 From The People, Yes (1936)... "The people is a myth, an abstraction." And what myth would you put in place of the people? And what abstraction would you exchange for this one? And when has creative man not toiled deep in myth? And who fights for a bellyful only and where is any name worth remembering for anything else than the human abstraction woven through it with invisible thongs? "Precisely who and what is the people?" Is this far off from asking what is grass? what is salt? what is the sea? what is loam? What are seeds? what is a crop? why must mammals have milk soon as born or they perish? And how did that alfalfa governor mean it: "The common people is a mule that will do anything you say except stay hitched"? - The People, Yes, 17, pg. 124 From Complete Poems (1950)... I have seen The old gods go And the new gods come. Day by day And year by year The idols fall and the idols rise. Today I worship the hammer. - The Hammer, pg. 132

Review # 2 was written on 2015-03-13 00:00:00 Jack Vaughan These deserve to be read aloud.