Nobody in America could have written [the lines of The People, Yes] but Carl Sandburg. They have the thumbprint of his personality, his ear for a good yarn, his sense of the revealing detail, his empathy with folk wisdom, his unique ability to transform the raw materials of common speech into a lyricism with a swing and rhythm recognizably his own. Other poets may from time to time touch on his materials, but their touch is inevitably different from Sandburg's. (p. 392)

The People, Yes [displays] Sandburg's zest for language—the language, as he called it, of "the people," the seemingly endless scroll on which he recorded their talk, their sayings, their self-contradictory wisdom, their resilience, the barbed solace of their wit…. "Fine words butter no parsnips," he says—perhaps he quotes a woman trying to feed a family of seven on a railroad blacksmith's pay, what his Swedish...