Carl sandburg poetry style

Let’s continue our celebration of U. S. National Poetry Month!

If Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman are the parents of modern American poetry, then one poet is most nearly the descendant with an equal inheritance from both: Carl Sandburg.

Sandburg’s poetry has two modes: the tightly compressed Imagist poem and the expansive, iterative, catalogic Whitman-like ode.

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I find him effective in both styles—and sometimes he mixes both, as in today’s selection. Each line in his “10 Definitions of Poetry”  is its own compressed poem, but taken together in a list they express different aspects of poetry.

The forgotten American Modernist.

Sandburg! thou shouldst be living at this hour!

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I’m something of an advocate for Sandburg here, as I feel he’s fallen out of favor during my lifetime and now is more than due to be re-evaluated. The major knocks against him in the later part of the 20^th century were that he wasn’t complex and subtle enough, that