From there Sandburg's then moved to Chicago, where Carl became the editorial writer for the Chicago Daily News. Harriet Taubman, founder of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, developed a fondness for Carl’s liberated, yet unostentatious style so reminiscent of bittersweet freedom of Whitman and began to publish his poems establishing him as a member of the Chicago literary renaissance.But it was here that he, as of this period, being Socialist sympathizer, working for the Social-Democrat Party in Wisconsin became the acting secretary of the first Socialist mayor of Milwaukee from 1910 to 1912. Additionally, while in Milwaukee, he married, the sister of photographer Edward Steichen, a woman by the name of Lillian Steichen.Never, again will there be such a writer capable of such individual style or subtle audacity as Carl Sandburg, born on Epiphany(January 6) of 1878 in Galesburg, Illinois. The winner of not one, but three Pulitzer prizes for literature, one for his biography of Abraham Lincoln, the 16th American president and Abolitionist hero, and two for his poetry. The American poet, writer and editor has became not just applauded for singular Asian-American fusion style, but his status as President Lyndon B. Johnson phrased it in his Eulogy speech at the poet’s death in 1967, “Carl Sandburg was more than the voice of America, more than the poet of its strength and genius. He was America.” Thought of as “A major literary figure in contemporary literature” especially for the ingenuity of his anthologies of collected verse, from Chicago Poems (1916) and Cornhuskers (1918)both of which earned him his first Pulitzer prize, to Smoke and Steel (1920), a portrayal of industrial America. Carl Sandburg was not born into fame, he was born into poverty, as the only child of Northern Swedish immigrants August and Clara Johnson, who after August found a job with the railroads changed the family name to Sandburg. Such was their economic state that at the age of thirteen, Carl left school to perform odd jobs, including bricklaying and dishwashing. After, traveling west to Kansas as a hobo, at age seventeen Carl served eight months in Puerto Rico during the Spanish-American war . Here, he left a student from a small school located in his own home town. Carl Sandburg was convinced by his friend to enroll in Lombard College upon returning from the war. The ambitious and determined Carl worked his way through college for four years but he never received a diploma(despite his later honorary degrees from Lombard, Knox College and Northwestern University). However, while in college his talent was discovered by his Professor Philip Green Wright, who encouraged and paid for the first publication of Carl’s writing( a volume of poetry, contained in pamphlet called Reckless Ecstasy, 1904). When Carl moved on to Milwaukee, his work as a advertising writer and newspaper reporter became the sad, replacement for the informed and creative writing he had done in college.But it was here that he, as of this period, being Socialist sympathizer, working for the Social-Democrat Party in Wisconsin became the acting secretary of the first Socialist mayor of Milwaukee from 1910 to 1912. | “Fog” Carl Sandburg The fog comes on little cat feet. It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on. Additionally, while in Milwaukee, he married, the sister of photographer Edward Steichen, a woman by the name of Lillian Steichen. From there Sandburg's then moved to Chicago, where Carl became the editorial writer for the Chicago Daily News. Harriet Taubman, founder of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, developed a fondness for Carl’s liberated, yet unostentatious style so reminiscent of bittersweet freedom of Whitman and began to publish his poems establishing him as a member of the Chicago literary renaissance. Encouraged and self-assured, Carl Sandburg began his most ambitious project, a biography of Abraham Lincoln, Sandburg’s own personal childhood hero. Sandburg collected Primary resources and began the legendary six-volume work. He followed this masterpiece with balladic collection of American folklore: The American Songbag and The New American Songbag (1950). These pieces were the subject of brief tours across America Sandburg toke for several years accompanied by banjo or guitar . In his final years Carl Sandburg continued to express himself as a patriot, from extensions of his biography Mary Lincoln, Wife and Widow (1932), The People, Yes (1936), Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (1939), to Complete Poems, which earned him his second Pulitzer in 1950 to his final two volumes of verse: Harvest Poems, 1910-1960 (1960) and Honey and Salt (1963). It was on July 22, 1967 that Carl Sandburg died enjoying “unrivaled appeal as a poet in his day, perhaps because the breadth of his experiences connected him with so many strands of American life”( according to Danny Heitman in A Workingman's Poet). |
Sandburg writes confidently and with wit, eloquence and pleasing rhythm. His work is brief, no more than two short sentences, deftly broken apart and placed line by line in an orderly fashion upon the page. Every line is bluntly succinct; never more than four words. Sandburg’s willingness to allow his words to stand alone, displays a literary tenacity and in return he is rewarded with simply cadenced verse and a elegant poem divided into pithy and deliberate thoughts allowing for easy, yet thorough dissection and a clear presentation of his extended metaphor. Such is adeptness with which this poem had been written that it requires no pre-determined rhyme scheme or format. Sandburg uses the flexibility allowed to him by choosing free verse to emphasis such ideas as independence and strength with controlled poise.
The arrangement of “Fog” is so brilliantly basic, it sings of understated beauty. A quick eight syllable couplet, it followed by a nineteen syllable quatrain, the lines are consistently short and concise while never exceeding seven syllables or four words. This emphasis on delicate and graceful detail and treasury of natural simplicity and raw splendor embodies the dignified yet relaxed phonetic movement, the poems flow without the aid of rhyme or established reason. Sandburg is renowned for the detached nature of his original free verse which requires no discernible pattern to feel calculated or precise. “Fog” moves with eloquence and intelligence, it is neither earthly and existential, and mundane falls far short in describing it’s amiable flow.
Carl Sandburg is a subtle master, with few words and romantic charm gives something of little observable substance the living, breathing qualities and contemplative attributes of a living creature. Sandburg opens “Fog” with zoomorphic personification using “little cat feet” to lend grace, stealth and agility to his vaporous entity. He then expands into a simple and sensible metaphor, comparing his amorphous cloud to a feline lending it qualities such as regal autonomy and restless curiosity. The detached warmth of cats is lovable despite their reputation for slight haughtiness they also have a wonderful familiar quality that reminds one of the hearth and home. The watery smoke that Sandburg’s he is so distant yet familiar, so very much like a cat, whose sovereignty is immortal, they will forever come and go as they pleases, fickle friends, governed only by self-sufficiency, they have always existed just out of our reach(seeming to disappear completely at close range), and yet it somehow makes the time spent with them all the more special. But somehow infinitely casual. Sandburg uses this feral, yet intimate liberation to describe the drive behind the fog’s briefest of visits and swiftest of departures, all the while never truly leaving us.
There had never been such a beloved or well received free-verse as “Fog”, never before had so something so uniquely American, yet with slight elements of Asian candor been so widely acclaimed or popular. The piece was direct and captivating, it had stability without being overbearing, clarity without being elementary, clever without being beyond the ordinary mind, short and yet far from forgettable. Although, first published in Carl Sandburg’s first mainstream collection of poetry entitled Chicago poems(1916), it appeared many times afterwards in several anthologies, perhaps the first of which being the 1919 Untermeyer, Louis edition of Modern American Poetry, by Harcourt, Brace and Howe. When, “Fog” alongside several other poems from Chicago poems in Poetry, a literary magazine of the time, it received this glowing review from Harriet Monroe,
“I remember the emotion with which I first read many of these poems ... That first conviction of beauty and power returns to me as I read them again. This is speech torn out of the heart, because the loveliness of ... a fog coming on "little cat feet,"—the incommunicable loveliness of the earth, of life—is too keen to be borne ….”
The only started here however as in the years of 1959 and 1960, a dramatic stage reading of selected Sandburg poems and prose entitled The World of Carl Sandburg, performed by Bette Davis and her husband Gary Merrill who toured the the nation and their shows culminated in a one-month run on Broadway( with Leif Erickson instead of Merrill) a performance that received the glowing accolade from the New York Times Howard Taubman( in the August 15, 1960 issue, page 44):
“… as if on catlike feet, she makes "Fog" seem new; …”
As well as staged dramatic readings, Carl Sandburg’s poems were also glorified in radio reading and vinyl recordings, as well as being at the receiving end of several parodies from the Richard Brautigan in 1956 to an episode of The McLaughlin Group in 2008. Sandburg snares our attention and briefly tantalizes our cognitive processes and literary senses, all the while with bright and intrepid eagerness, blended with feline impatience and graceful speed the poem is even more fleeting than the “fog” it illustrates, leaving us dazzled in it’s serene wake.