The Other Carl Sandburg

Using Penelope Niven's standard 1991 biography, Carl Sandburg, and a close reading of a series of political articles Sandburg (1878-1962) wrote expressing socialist beliefs, this book attempts to redeem the reputation of the beloved but bad poet by amplifying a few years of his political life around WWI. Temple University American studies professor Yannella's political analysis of American socialism around WWI is turgid, but detailed. More problematic is his fervent conviction that during his lifetime Carl Sandburg was universally appreciated as a writer. The truth is that for the last 40 years of his life he was often derided by other American poets: e.g., the great poet Elizabeth Bishop writes in her Letters of the comic horror she felt when Sandburg suddenly appeared at a 1940s Washington, D.C., party. Yannella unconvincingly claims that Sandburg was an ""extraordinary"" and ""wonderfully gifted"" writer, presenting as good poetry Sandburg's feeble stuff like: ""One child coughed his lungs away, two more have adenoids and can neither talk nor run like their mother."" In his attempts to rehabilitate Sandburg, he even goes so far as to compare him, unconvincingly, to Walt Whitman, even though the two have little in common beyond the surface similarities of free-verse and populism. Sandburg fans are better off sticking to Niven's biography. (Nov.)