SOURCE: Weirick, Bruce. “The Rise of the Middle West.” In From Whitman to Sandburg in American Poetry: A Critical Survey, pp. 192-221. New York: Macmillan, 1924.

In the following excerpt, Weirick calls Sandburg the chief poet of the Middle West and the principal successor to Walt Whitman in American poetry.

The chief figure in middle western poetry, the poet who unites in himself many of the interests which these other writers suggest or touch on merely, and perhaps the chief figure in American poetry since Whitman, is Carl Sandburg. In his book there is a large massiveness, a variety, and a stirring, that is vastly nearer the heart of things than either Masters' cynicism or Lindsay's optimism. Big, lumbering, Swedish, amorphic, kindly, and crude, class-conscious, and violently humanitarian, Sandburg may best be described as a clay-footed Titan. With his elephantine hands he holds now the pen of an etcher...