SOURCE: Cook, Howard Willard. “Carl Sandburg.” In Our Poets of Today, pp. 129-35. New York: Moffat, Yard & Company, 1923.

In the following excerpt, Cook briefly summarizes Sandburg's life and career as a poet up to 1923.

“Carl Sandburg is an observer with sympathy but without fear. … He puts words to the uses of bronze. His music at times is of clearest sweetness like the tinkling of blue chisels; at other times it has the appropriate harshness of resisting metal.”

So Carl Sandburg is described by Edgar Lee Masters in writing of his Chicago Poems, published in April, 1916.

A number of poems included in this volume were first printed in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, and in Reedy's Mirror. Their creator is a man who glories in free verse, whose lines are sometimes almost primeval in their intensity, but they are American to the core, and re-echo something of Whitman in...