Sandburg Is Chicago

To discover the focal point of literary life in Chicago, that literary center of the middle-west, some say, indeed, of America, is a difficult task. Perhaps it is at the White Paper Club, where one finds genial Emerson Hough, active, white-haired, forward-looking rather than given to reminiscing, planning a fishing trip with enthusiasm! There is the office of Poetry, where sits the discoverer of many renowned American poets, Harriet Munroe, and where one may occasionally encounter Henry B. Fuller, one of the quietest and most significant figures in the progress of American letters. There is the University of Chicago, with its Robert Herrick, whose Homely Lilla brings him back to fiction after several years of silence. There is Evanston, with Keith Preston, the gay columnist and gayer Greek professor, with Henry Kitchell Webster and Edwin Balmer, both popular novelists. There is Schlogel's, chiefly picturesque as a cafe by reason of pre-prohibition memories, where gather the denisons of The Chicago Daily News, where one may find Harry Hanson, the Heywood Broun of Chicago; Ben Hecht, who aims to shock; and last, but oh! not least, Carl Sandburg!

For me, Carl Sandburg is the focal point of Chicago literary life. He breathes Chicago. He is Chicago. If you would understand that banging, sweeping city with its stockyards and its shining lakefront, read The Windy City. No poem, perhaps, ever epitomized a city so successfully. Sandburg is tall, stooping, quiet, his voice, hesitant and booming. To explore Chicago streets with Sandburg on a summer day is to learn the spirit of the town.

Sandburg's parents were Swedish, yet somehow he has the warmth of southern countries in him, too. He was born in Galesburg, Ill. He was a soldier in the Spanish-American War. He has worked on railroads. He has washed dishes. He has been a political organizer and soap-box orator. He attended "Lombard College," where he was editor-in-chief of the undergraduate paper. Wide contacts with the facts of life have given him a love of people in the mass of crowds, of ugliness, of brutality. More than any other American poet, with his curious rythms sprung from Negro and Indian sources, with his slang and his brassy effects, he has, I believe, reached the heart of the American people. If you have never heard Sandburg sing folk songs of America, bending over his guitar, white locks down over his forehead, dreaming of hoboes by a fire under some abandoned freight car, you have missed an experience that is comparable to none that I know. J. F.