WH William Ellery Leonard ILLIAM ELLERY LEONARD was born in Plainfield, New Jersey, January 25, 1876. He received his A.M. at Harvard in 1899 and completed his studies at the Universities of Göttingen and Bonn. After traveling for several years throughout Europe, he became a teacher and has been professor of English in the University of Wisconsin since 1906. The Vaunt of Man (1912) is a characteristic volume. Traditional in form and material, it is anything but conservative in spirit. Leonard's fervor speaks in the simplest of his quatrains and sonnets. This protesting passion is given an even wider sweep in The Lynching Bee and Other Poems (1920). Tutankhamen and After (1924) is an ambitious attempt to picture the continuity of man's life in three pages, but in spite of a few felicitous lines the title-poem is prosy. It was a grave injustice to claim this as Leonard's “most representative volume." That distinction must be claimed by Two Lives, which was privately issued in 1923 and publicly offered in 1925. Reminiscent of Richard Dehmel's Zwei Menschen, this chain of sonnets compresses an intensity in which the effect of the cumulative drama is far greater than that of any single poem. The Locomotive God (1927) is a strange document written in autobiographical prose. It is the narrative of a student and poet who ends as a neurotic confined by an unusual phobia within a few blocks' radius of his home. Disproportionate in its concern with trifles, painful as analysis of fevered imagination, the book has a personal interest beyond the case history; it is frankly autobiographical. A Son of Earth (1929) is composed of selections from Leonard's previous poetry with the exception of his translations and Two Lives. It, too, was arranged autobiographically "with reference to activities, aims, influences, crises." This larger collection suffers the same defects as Two Lives; its sincerity is compelling, its candor unreserved, but only a few pages could be offered as examples of poetry per se. A Son of Earth contains page after page of inversions and pomposities incredibly preserved; one can understand the youth that luxuriated in such clichés as “golden fee," "slumbering acons," "shadowy woodlands," "white nymphs," "brazen trumpets," "immemorial tides," but it is hard to credit a maturity that proudly reprints them. Rhetoric aside, there is wisdom here and wit, a malicious sparkle in the revised fables grouped under "Aesop and Hyssop." Besides his original poetry, Leonard has published several volumes of translations. of Beowulf, Empedocles and Lucretius. THE IMAGE OF DELIGHT O how came I that loved stars, moon, and flame, All inner shrines and temples of the free, Ọ how came I to stoop to loving thee— Which all one purple day I deemed divine- TO THE VICTOR Man's mind is larger than his brow of tears; Carl Sandburg arl (august) sanDBURG was born of Swedish stock at Galesburg, Illinois, January 6, 1878. His schooling was haphazard; at thirteen he went to work on a milk wagon. During the next six years he was, in rapid succession, porter in a barber shop, scene-shifter in a cheap theater, truck-handler in a brickyard, turner-apprentice in a pottery, dish-washer in Denver and Omaha hotels, harvest hand in Kansas wheatfields. These tasks equipped him, as no amount of learning could have done, to be the laureate of industrial America. When war with Spain was declared in 1898, Sandburg, avid for fresh adventure, enlisted in Company C, Sixth Illinois Vol unteers. On his return from the campaign in Porto Rico, Sandburg entered Lombard College in Galesburg and, for the first time, began to think in terms of literature. After leaving college, where he had been captain of the basket-ball team as well as editorin-chief of the college paper, Sandburg did all manner of things to earn a living. He was advertising manager for a department store and worked as district organizer for the Social-Democratic party of Wisconsin. He became salesman, pamphleteer, newspaperman. In 1904 Sandburg published the proverbial “slender sheaf," a tiny pamphlet of wenty-two poems, uneven in quality, but strangely like the work of the mature Sandburg in feeling. What is more, these experiments anticipated the inflection of the later poems, with their spiritual kinship to Henley and Whitman; several of these early experiments (with the exception of the rhymed verses) might be placed, without seeming incongruous, in the later collections. The idiom of Smoke and Steel (1920) is more intensified, but it is the same idiom as that of "Milville" (1903), which begins: Down in southern New Jersey they make glass. By day and by night, the fires burn on in Milville and bid the sand let in the light. Meanwhile the newspaperman was struggling to keep the poet alive. Until he was thirty-six years old Sandburg was unknown to the literary world. In 1914 a group of his poems appeared in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse; during the same year one of the group (the now famous "Chicago") was awarded the Levinson prize of two hundred dollars. A little more than a year later his first real book was published, and Sandburg's stature was apparent to all who cared to look. Chicago Poems (1916) is full of ferment; it seethes with loose energy. If Frost is an intellectual aristocrat, Sandburg might be termed an emotional democrat. Sandburg's speech is simple and powerful; he uses slang as freely as his predecessors used the now archaic tongue of their times. Never has the American vulgate been used with such artistry and effect. Immediately cries of protest were heard: Sandburg was coarse and brutal; his work ugly and distorted; his language unrefined, unfit for poetry. His detractors forgot that Sandburg was brutal only to condemn brutality; that beneath his toughness, he was one of the tenderest of living poets; that, when he used colloquialisms and a richly metaphorical slang, he was searching for new poetic values in "limber, lasting, fierce words"-unconsciously answering Whitman who asked, "Do you suppose the liberties and brawn of These States have to do only with delicate lady-words? With gloved gentleman-words?" Cornhuskers (1918) is another step forward; it is as sweeping as its forerunner and more sensitive. The gain in power and restraint is evident in the very first poem, a wide-swept vision of the prairie. Here is something of the surge of a Norse saga; Cornhuskers is keen with a salty vigor, a sympathy for all that is splendid and terrible in Nature. But the raw violence is restrained to the point of half-withheld mysticism. There are, in this volume, dozens of those delicate perceptions of beauty that must astonish those who think that Sandburg can write only a big-fisted, roughneck sort of poetry. As Sandburg has sounded some of the most fortissimo notes in modern poetry, he has also breathed some of its softest phrases. "Cool Tombs," one of the most poignant lyrics of our times, moves with a low music; "Grass" whispers as quietly as the earlier "Fog" stole in on stealthy, cat feet. Smoke and Steel (1920) is the synthesis of its predecessors. In this collection, Sandburg has fused mood, accent and image. Whether the poet evokes the spirit of a jazz-band or, having had the radiance (the "flash crimson"), prays to touch life at its other extreme, this volume is not so vociferous as it is assured. Smoke-belching chimneys are here, quarries and great bowlders of iron-ribbed rock; here are titanic visions: the dreams of men and machinery. And silence is here—the silence of sleeping tenements and sun-soaked cornfields. Slabs of the Sunburnt West (1923) is a fresh fusing: here in quick succession are the sardonic invectives of "And So Today," the rhapsody of "The Windy City" (an amplification of the early "Chicago"), and the panoramic title-poem. Although the book's chief exhibit is the amplitude of its longer poems, there are a few brevities (such as "Upstream") which have the vigor of a jubilant cry. Sandburg is still tempted to talk at the top of his voice, to bang the table and hurl his loudest epithets into the teeth of his opponents. But often he goes to the other extreme; he is likely to leave his material soft and loose instead of solidifying his emotions. There are times when the poet seems unsure whether or not he can furnish more than a clew to the half-realized wisps of his imagination. But though his meaning may not always be clear, there is no mistaking the power of his feeling nor the curious cadences of his music. Good Morning, America (1928) is characteristically Sandburg at his best and worst. There are passages which are hopelessly enigmatic, passages which are only inflations of commonplace ideas. On the other hand, there are pages which are remarkable experiments in suspension, pages sensitive with a beauty delicately perceived. The thirty-eight "Tentative (First Model) Definitions of Poetry" with which the volume is prefaced are footnotes as well as prologues to his work in general, and the purely descriptive pieces are among his finest. Incidentally, the volume shows how far Sandburg has gone in critical esteem since the time when his Chicago Poems was openly derided, the title poem of Good Morning, America, having been read as a Phi Beta Kappa poem at Harvard. Here, too, one is impressed by Sandburg's hatred of war; Sandburg was one of the first American poets to express the growing protests in "A. E. F." and other poems. Besides his poetry, Sandburg has written three volumes of imaginative and, if one can conceive of such a thing, humorously mystical tales for children: Rootabaga Stories (1922), Rootabaga Pigeons (1923) and Potato Face (1930), the last beingso the poet and publisher insist-tales for adults of all ages. A collection of the Rootabaga stories was illustrated by Peggy Bacon in 1929. Eight years were spent traveling and studying documents for his vitalized Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years (1926), and assembling material for his collection of native folk-tunes The American Songbag (1927), a massive and revealing folio of words, music, and accompaniments to two hundred and eighty songs, more than one hundred of them never in print until Sandburg's ear and notebook gathered them from pioneer grandmothers, work-gangs, railroad men, hoboes, convicts, cowboys, mountain people, and others who sing "because they must." Another ten years prepared him to write Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, the six volumes constituting the most extensive modern presentation of Lincoln and his times. In 1924 the poet perfected a unique lecture-part recital, part singing of American folk-tunes, part "circus," as he describes it—which he continued to give throughout the country. Accompanied by his guitar, Sandburg brought new values to the reading of poetry. His low-toned footnotes were full of philosophic asides. Speaking of realism and romanticism, he once told the following fable: "There was a man who did not find in his house all he desired. One day he came in to find his wife working with a workbasket full of bright silk threads. He caught up a handful. He held them tight for a moment. Then he opened his hand. The threads became hundreds of brilliant butterflies flying joyfully about the room. The man watched them. Then he opened his hand, gathered them all in, tightened his hold. They became silk threads; he returned them to the workbasket. . . . And if you can believe that," Sandburg concluded, "you are a romanticist." Suddenly in his fifty-eighth year the poet emerged tougher and more resolute than ever. The People, Yes (1936) is a synthesis of research and rhapsody, of the collector's energy and the creator's imagination. The work is a carryall of folk-tales, catch-phrases, tall stories, gossip and history. With a new gusto and an old reliance on the native idiom, Sandburg affirms his faith. Never, except in Whitman, has the common man been so celebrated; never has there been a greater tribute to the people's shrewd skepticism and stubborn optimism, their patience and their power. Here are the people, misled and misunderstood, bewildered and betrayed, but stronger and wiser than they know: "a reservoir of the human reserves that shape history." TEN DEFINITIONS OF POETRY I Poetry is a projection across silence of cadences arranged to break that silence with definite intentions of echoes, syllables, wave lengths. 2 Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly the air. 3 Poetry is a series of explanations of life, fading off into horizons too swift for explanations. 4 Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. 5 Poetry is a theorem of a yellow-silk handkerchief knotted with riddles, sealed in a balloon tied to the tail of a kite flying in a white wind against a blue sky in spring. 6 Poetry is the silence and speech between a wet struggling root of a flower and a sunlit blossom of that flower. 7 Poetry is the harnessing of the paradox of earth cradling life and then entomb ing it. 8 Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away. 9 Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits. 10 Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during a moment. CHICAGO Hog Butcher for the World, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders: They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys. And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again. And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger. And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them: Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning. |