Carl Sandburg

 

Photograph by Edward Steichen (1933)

Aztec Mask

I wanted a man's face looking into the jaws and throat
    of life
With something proud on his face, so proud no smash
    of the jaws,
No gulp of the throat leaves the face in the end
With anything else than the old proud look:
         Even to the finish, dumped in the dust,
         Lost among the used-up cinders,
         This face, men would say, is a flash,
         Is laid on bones taken from the ribs of the earth,
         Ready for the hammers of changing, changing years,
         Ready for the sleeping, sleeping years of silence.
         Ready for the dust and fire and wind.
I wanted this face and I saw it today in an Aztec mask.
A cry out of storm and dark, a red yell and a purple prayer,
A beaten shape of ashes
              waiting the sunrise or night,
              something or nothing,
              proud-mouthed,
              proud-eyed gambler

Exhibition Label (National Portrait Gallery)

Poor Carl Sandburg! Evidently he thought Robert Frost, his near-contemporary and fellow avatar of American folksiness, liked him and that they were comrades in their common purpose to celebrate America’s common people. The canny and ultracompetitive Frost cast his gimlet eye on the midwesterner and decided he was no threat and could be treated politely, at least in public. Sandburg’s writing and his public persona suffer from an excess of ingenuous sincerity. His poems are all action and, like political slogans they overpower the reader in their didactic populist directness. Sandburg followed Whitman’s poetic structures, yet in his eagerness to celebrate “genuine” America and the heroism of ordinary people, he lacked the emotional qualities of the older poet. Despite it all, Sandburg is a great poet, one who must be reckoned with simply because of his relentless drive to embody America in his writing.