Carl Sandburg (1878–1967)

Drawn from the early chapters of Carl Sandburg's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, "Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years", this is the story of Abraham Lincoln's childhood. Growing up poor on the family farm, Abe did chores, helped his father cut down trees, and expertly skinned animals and cured hides. As a young man, he became an avid reader. When he witnessed a slave auction while on a flatboat trip down the Mississippi, he was forever changed--and so was the future of America. This is the remarkable story of Lincoln's youth, early America, and the pioneer life that shaped one of our country's greatest presidents.… (more)

This book ended up being a conundrum for me. At times I really liked it, at times it drug on and at other times I did not care for it. This large volume is a condensation of a six volume set, which cannot be an esay task and I'm sure it suffered in some details as all condensations must. At times this resulted in certain details just being recited as bullet points on a list which did nothing for me. The language at times does tend to get flowery as you would expect from a poet, but did not juxtapose well with the horrific civil war subject matter, I felt. I was appalled at some of the re-enactments of slaves speaking in Brer Rabbit/Uncle Remus style dialects. I also did not appreciate the obvious bias favoring Lincoln, as if we must view every word and action of his in a positive light. Lincoln was a superb leader and a genius; but he was also human and not infallible and not without flaws. Likewise, I did not like the negative bias given to those who opposed Lincoln in any way. I, for one, don't think those who advocated for peace or for total and immediate abolition of slavery should have been cast in a negative light. Some of those portrayals really bothered me, such as with Sumner.

But at the end of the day, this is truly a great and historic work. It is in particular a collection of seemingly endless anecdotes of Lincoln, and ultimately I ended up truly feeling that I got a flavor for Lincoln, the person, through these anectodes he was nearly constantly telling. He had one for every occasion, it seems. Though it was relatively brief in this volume, I most enjoyed the portions covering The Prairie Years of Lincoln. I think I should have enjoyed the volumes devoted to just that subject quite a bit better than this condensation of Prairie Years and War Years. Of course, the War Years were just too depressing but there is much history here with list after list of battles and casualties and who won what, as well as strategy and military personnel turnovers.

The end of the book covers Lincoln's assasination in detail.… (more)

Carl Sandburg
American Poet
1878 - 1967
Well-Educated Mind Poetry
⭐⭐⭐
American poet Carl Sandburg had a fascinating life. Born in Illinois, in 1878, to immigrant parents, he dropped out of school at age thirteen to work and support his family. At nineteen, he took a train west and worked as a laborer. Then he enlisted in the U.S. Army as a private in the Spanish-American War. After the war, he attended college, though he did not graduate. Nonetheless, he was already writing poetry and even publishing some of his works.

Next, he worked as a traveling salesman and then a party organizer for the Social Democrats. And finally, he performed a variety of jobs in the newspaper industry as a journalist, reporter, war correspondent, movie critic, and columnist.

But it was his wife, Lilian Steichen, who encouraged him to write more poetry -- and seriously. In his lifetime, he had produced over 1600 poems, writing in free verse about social ills, the human spirit, cultures, adventures, the American nation, heroes, corruption, obstacles, nature, and obviously much more.

In 1964, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Lyndon Johnson. And, of course, he was given awards and prizes for his poetry, as well. But he won a Pulitzer Prize for his historical biography of Abraham Lincoln, which I am interested in reading, if I make time for it, particularly because I own it -- yay!!

Following are the suggested poems I read for The Well-Educated Mind Poetry list:

Chicago
Cool Tombs
Elizabeth Umpstead
Fog
Grass
I am the People, the Mob
Nocturne in a Desert Brickyard
The People, Yes
Planked Whitefish
Skyscraper
Smoke and Steel
Window

Some of these I found clever and intriguing, but I was not as inspired or moved like I was with Robert Frost or Paul Laurence Dunbar. The poems by Sandburg were more political or socialist in thought or difficult topics in general, not warm and fuzzy or pleasant. Many of the aforementioned poems were odd and left me speechless in a empty way. I did not have anything to say about them on GoodReads. I read them and said, "Ooookaaay." Then I moved on.

But I understand he wrote directly from his personal experiences and observations, and these were things that needed to be said in his time. So, he spoke them in prose.

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