In the following essay, Wilson details Sandburg's life and literary career, citing significant developments in his later poetry.

In the following essay, Brumm enumerates leitmotifs—including the innocent child, victimized maiden, and death—in Sandburg's Chicago Poems.

In the following essay, Beyers links Chicago Poems to poetic tradition, observing that in many cases Sandburg modernized older forms in his verse.

In the following excerpt, Lowell considers Sandburg's life, his work as a propagandist and lyric poet, and his place in the American poetic tradition.

In the following essay, Crowder investigates Sandburg's rich and figurative use of color in his 1963 collection, Honey and Salt.

In the following essay, Crowder claims that Sandburg's impact on American poets and poetry is greater than most critics are likely to admit.

In the following essay, Friberg probes Sandburg's poetry as it presents a tension between two ideals—America as a paradise and America as a land of progress—and as it promotes the possibilities of a socialist society in America.

In the following essay, Whipple surveys Sandburg's poetic sensibility and vision, arguing that while his talents and significance are considerable, Sandburg's poetry is sometimes poorly realized.

In the following essay, Mayer traces the “lyrical pessimism” of Sandburg's early poetry, finding a late response to it in The People, Yes, which presents Sandburg's theme of “the divinity of the people.”

In the following essay, Van Wienen maintains that Sandburg was far more political in his early poetry than is generally acknowledged.

In the following essay, Epstein sees Sandburg as more an entertainer than a poet and chronicles his spectacular lifelong fame.

In the following essay, Van Doren assesses Sandburg's varied poetic talent and accomplishments.

In the following essay, Reid focuses on four largely unknown poems by Sandburg originally published in the Chicago newspaper The Day Book while Sandburg was a member of the staff.

In the following essay, Basler appraises Sandburg as a poet outside of the literary establishment.

In the following essay, Compton collects responses to Sandburg's works from a number of ordinary readers.

In the following essay, Cargill investigates political themes in Sandburg's writing, which he finds to be ultimately detrimental to Sandburg's later poetry.

In the following essay, Untermeyer extols the combination of strength, delicacy, and passion in the verses of Chicago Poems and Cornhuskers.

In the following excerpt, Jones evaluates Sandburg as a poet and underscores his strongly satirical voice.

In the following essay, Kreymborg traces Sandburg's poetic development from Chicago Poems to Good Morning, America.

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

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] San...

In the following essay, Mieder studies Sandburg's use and manipulation of American proverbs in his poem “Good Morning, America.”

[Sandburg's] way of using language can be deceptive. It is much like prose in its syntax, and the colloquial vocabulary adds to an apparent casualness. In his best poetry Sandburg uses vernacular language, slang even; by this I mean that in Sandburg's instance it isn't the self-conscious employment of a "low" vocabulary to call attention to commonness, a vaunting of plebeian virtue (though later in his career Sandburg was prone to do just this, ad nauseam). An expression s...

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

In the following essay, Benjamin lauds Sandburg as a poet of sympathy, simplicity, and the everyday.

In the following excerpt, Boynton discusses Sandburg as a Chicago writer, the “brutality” of his language, his concern with social injustice, and his poetic frankness.

In the following essay, Oktenberg examines Sandburg's myth of “the People” and unfavorably compares the poet to Walt Whitman as an representative of America and democracy.

A prominent theme in Chicago Poems is the longing of ordinary people for the beauty and happiness they have never known. This clutching at dreams was not a creation of Sandburg's fantasy, but a social phenomenon which he accurately observed. (p. 18) A more cheerful theme in Chicago Poems is the laughter and joy workmen manage to find in spite of their toil and poverty. (p. 19)

In the following essay, an anonymous critic discusses the merits of Sandburg's poem “They Will Say.”

In the following review of Sandburg's first three major volumes of verse, Loeber argues against those critics who dismiss Sandburg's poetry as merely “tough” or “insensitive.”

Carl Sandburg has been around a long time. In that period, during which modern art has celebrated some of its greatest triumphs, he has accumulated a mass of poems which have now been published as a single volume [Complete Poems]…. Search as we will among them we must say at once that technically the poems reveal no initiative whatever other than their formlessness; there is no motivating spirit held in the front of the mind to control them. And without a theory, as Pasteur once said, to unify it, a ...

In the following review, Hackett admires the intensity and rhythm of Chicago Poems but disagrees with Sandburg's vision of Chicago.

In the following excerpt from a summary volume of U.S. literary history, the unsigned critic alleges that there is no significant stylistic development among Sandburg's collections of poetry but acknowledges that The People, Yes (1936) “is one of the great American books.”

[Vachel] Lindsay once said that "the people of America walk through me, all the people walk through my veins, as though they were in the streets of a city, and clamor for voice." But it was Carl Sandburg …, even more than Lindsay, who wrote the poetry whose underlying intention is suggested by these words. His legacies to later poets were his "report of the people," as William Carlos Williams called it, and his flexible, inventive, and scrapbook methods of presentation. Hi...

In the following review, Frederick praises the “clearness and validity” of Sandburg's interpretation of early twentieth-century America in his Chicago Poems.

In the following review of Chicago Poems, Monroe characterizes Sandburg's work as “a masterpiece of portraiture” that ranges from the “rugged” to the “exquisitely delicate.”

In the following review, Zwaska comments on Sandburg as a success among modern poets, and on the vast range of life displayed in Chicago Poems.

In the following essay, Pound writes flippantly on the subject of labeling Sandburg a “tough” poet.

In Honey and Salt over two hundred eighty-five color references occur, either by overt naming or by suggestion (in sixty-five pages of the Complete Poems)…. [Sandburg] had a vivid sense of color which he relied on all his life. His first book, Chicago Poems (1916), although not quite so "colorful" as Honey and Salt, nevertheless made use of hue and shade over two hundred fifty times. In this first book reds are prominent, for there is a great deal of brawling and heartiness as well as a...

In the following excerpt, Phelps finds Chicago Poems “overrated” but acknowledges that Sandburg is an original writer with the “true power of poetic interpretation.”

Sandburg's life and times can be found in his poetry, biography and history. He struck out, most notably, in his one novel, Remembrance Rock. Though parts of it have an epic quality, it was written during and after the Second World War, and suffered from patriotism and giantism. Where does Sandburg stand in American letters? Among the establishment literary personages, about where they place John Steinbeck, which is not very high. Yet readers, young and old, keep discovering and rediscovering both of...

In the following review of the reissued Chicago Poems, the unsigned critic draws attention to the work's ambivalent status near the end of the twentieth century.

Most of us non-Americans probably think of Carl Sandburg … as a Mid-West Walt Whitman writing poems which move to the steady puff puff of a long cow-catcher prairie express. The train is bound for Democratic Progress; and the poet, aboard the observation car, announces to 'the People' all the delights—and horrors—the passengers must pass through as they make their way to Utopia. A worthy somewhat dated itinerary though much preferable to Aragon's USSR/USSR and other...