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 mother might have said. "Moonlight dries no mittens." But let us not too quickly conclude that Sandburg, because he values parsnips and dry mittens, therefore despises moonlight, or what moonlight—traditionally anciently, the emblem of imagination—can mean to "the people," the very sort of people whose apothegms he so delighted in making into lines of poetry. (p. 393)
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