In his critical study,
Carl Sandburg, Richard Crowder noted that "Sandburg had been the first poet of modern times actually to use the language of the people as his almost total means of expression.... Sandburg had entered into the language of the people; he was not looking at it as a scientific phenomenon or a curiosity.... He was at home with it." In collections such as
Chicago Poems, Cornhuskers, Smoke and Steel, and
The People, Yes, Sandburg celebrated the life of Everyman in the cities and on the land.
Yet Sandburg's first Pulitzer Prize came not for his poetry, but for the second part of his monumental Lincoln biography, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years. Over fifteen years in the writing, Sandburg's six-part biography had no indexes or footnotes, none of the trappings of academic history, but was instead a biography for the people. As the historian Henry Steele Commager noted in a contemporary review in the Yale Review, Sandburg "has realized that Lincoln belongs to the people, not to the historians, and he has given us a portrait from which a whole generation may draw understanding of the past and inspiration for the future." Poetry, history, and biography were just three of the professional hats Sandburg wore.
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