He was a journalist by trade; his newspaper reportage and commentary documented labor, racial, and economic strife and other key events of his times. But Carl Sandburg was first and foremost a poet, writing poems about America in the American idiom for the American people. The titles of his volumes of poetry testify to his major themes:
Chicago Poems (1916),
Cornhuskers (1918),
Smoke and Steel (1920),
Good Morning, America (1928),
The People, Yes (1936).
Louis Untermeyer described Sandburg in 1923 as the "emotional democrat" of American poetry, the "laureate of industrial America." Harriet Monroe, founder and first editor of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, gave Sandburg's poetry its first serious audience in 1914. She believed that this son of Swedish immigrants was particularly suited to write about the "incomplete, but urgent and hopeful" American democracy. She wrote in Poets and Their Art (1926) that Sandburg was bent on the business, "in the deepest sense a poet's business, of seeing our national life in the large--its beauty and glory, its baseness and shame."
Sandburg's vision of the American experience was shaped in the American Midwest during the complicated events which brought the nineteenth century to a close.
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