SOURCE: Epstein, Joseph. “The People's Poet.” Commentary 93, no. 5 (May 1992): 47-52.

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

The Poet is a heroic figure belonging to all ages; whom all ages possess, when once he is produced, whom the newest age as the oldest may produce—and will produce, always when Nature pleases. Let Nature send a Hero-soul; in no age is it other than possible that he may be shaped into a Poet.

—Thomas Carlyle

Passages like my epigraph probably go a long way toward suggesting that Carlyle was more than a little nuts. Who, in our day, would search among poets for a hero? With only a few exceptions, poets in our time have found a home in the university, where they are rather dim figures, permitted to work at their craft, not so...