Poets of the People

It is a good thing in these days when poetry has been relegated, by an important group of the poets themselves, to the role of caviar at the human feast, to have two poets maintain it in its bread-and-butter estate. The nervous exhaustion and debility of Pound and the early Eliot, and their followers, have lowered poetry to a private exercise, brilliant for its very moodiness and lack of oratory. But poetry without oratory—which is the arousing of the emotions of others to a definite act of faith in life—is a house built on the sand; and the waves of the years to come will be strewn with the brilliant wreckage of many of the brightest poetic names of our time. To last, poetry must assume a public function. That sounds old-fashioned, but it is precisely as orators that Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters show their strength in their latest volumes, “The People, Yes” and “Poems of People.” Their scorn is not a private one, but satire pure and simple; and their bitterness is not against the powers above or within ourselves, but against erring humanity. They, as well as Pound and Eliot, know things are wrong; but they want something done about it. And they have faith that there is enough of nobility left in men to do it.

Masters and Sandburg are all the more striking today because another, younger group of poets, rejecting the defeatism of Eliot and Pound, has turned to the world of economics, now that the esthetic patterns have followed the theological ones into the province of archaeology, to find something to put faith in. These proletarians—cold misuse of as warm a word as the human mind has ever created!— preach world revolution as the way to salvation, of the soul as of the body. They profess to a belief in the people, but it is largely a belief in mass rather than the merit of warmth and light, in avoirdupois and numbers rather than in a patent of nobility in the average man. It is a belief in still another importation from Europe, like the many in the nineteenth century, the very ones that Whitman cried out upon. These young men are so dazzled by the light of Russia that they are blind to the light that has burned ever since our history’s beginnings in log cabins in the Southern mountains, in plain little houses of the Middle West, or on small New England farms.

Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters are men of another sort. In this year when many of the older poets are represented by important new books, Frost and Stephen Benet and A. E. Housman, to name but three, these two pioneers of the poetic renaissance of twenty years ago have come forward with two new charters of their old belief in the average American man, the man of homely words and spread-eagle American words, tart and tough native wit, and love of soil and sons and strength, the man who believes in hogs and wheat and apples and manhood. These two have been preaching proletarianism of the right kind, the kind a father of a big family goes in for, ever since they started writing over two decades ago and ever since Whitman and their own colorful lives unrolled that gospel to their eyes. It reads still like music after the nervous and irritable polemics of the young urban preachers of social justice.

These two poets whom Whitman spoke to across the years are rather apt to forget their master and take the easy modern way of laying most of our troubles on capitalism. A banker is apt to be a bogey. But they make ample amends in their use of the whole cloth of human nature which has always warmed the common American with a peculiar heat, their use of his idiom, and their belief in life as a permanent attraction. Of the two, Masters is much more traditional in his manner. He is apt to set forth his gospel of the wholeness of life in the old ballad stanzas and images. Sandburg is the grander orator and uses more the Book of Job rhetoric which Whitman employed. He has periods of his own, of fire and ice, too—talk as low as that of traveling salesmen and as electrical and ethereal as that of one of the archangels. He speaks both languages, and he speaks them together. That has been, and still is, one of his strongest assets. In this book, as in his earlier ones, he mixes mud and rainbows together:

These are belongings of the people, dusty with the dust of earth, merciless as sudden hog cholera, hopeful as a rainwashed hill of moonlit pines.

Man is an earthworm and a rider to the moon; the people are “mixed from a bowl of blue sky dreams and sea slime

facts.” Masters is at his best, too, when he mingles the low

and the high, when he writes of lovely loyalties that shone

in cheap hotels under fly-specked lithographs of Washington. The contrasts that are America are his themes: squalor

in the rooms of state; splendor in drab little houses back of Main Street.

Both poets love the smaller people best. They believe in the conjecture that God must love the common people best because he made so many of them. Masters is at his weak-est when he writes of the big-wigs, Washington, Jefferson, and Jackson. He is strongest when he has to do with defeated men, the mute orators of the waste of life, the Lute Crocketts and Tom Barrons, who take to whisky at the end.

 Lute Crockett died last night,

 By the town worsted and his fight

With solitaire and booze.

Sandburg votes with Walt Whitman also, for people who are no different from the grass, no worse than the lowest, no better than the best, for the failures and the down-and-outers. He makes whole poems of catalogues of such Monday and Tuesday people, as Whitman does. But he has an appetite for all kinds: sentimental railroad engineers who want their ashes strewn on the curves they have rounded so often, horsemen who want theirs strewn on Kentucky race-tracks, foolish men who burn down their barns to get rid of the rats, the cannonfodder, the riffraff, the hog-raiser whom mortgages have ruined but who keeps on raising hogs, the Mississippi pilots and the tinhorn sports who root for the Cubs. Sandburg is catholic. He loves them all. He is Pan-American, too. He loves the wiry Texas Ranger who came alone to quell a riot because there was only one riot, and the close-mouthed Vermont farmer who finally said to his wife: “When I think of how much you have meant to me all these years, it is almost more than I can do sometimes to keep from telling you so.” Sandburg’s heart is as wide as the States, and he finds poetry in every town. Like the Lincoln whom he is giving his best pith to explain, and whom he is growing to resemble in his very features as the years go by, he is an insatiable lover of men. Masters is more rooted in the towns and farms of the Middle West. But he finds poetry also in unlikely places, tumbledown yards full of sunflowers and incipient Mark Twains. Both singers are steeped in humor, Sandburg especially so. And humor, with both, is the major American virtue. It is what keeps the good men going, through bank failures and other more vital disappointments.

Because he is a poet of plain folks, Sandburg makes fine use of the folk poetry, the adages and wise sayings which we hear every day, which are the very bones and sinews of English and American literature. He writes whole poems that are strings of popular proverbs: “Fine words butter no parsnips. . . . Moonlight dries no mittens. . . . Better leave the child’s nose dirty than wring it off. . . . The dumb mother understands the dumb child.” He makes up proverbs of his own, on the folk patterns: “Love your neighbor as yourself but don’t take down your fence.” The words of this troubadour of the people are the words that smell fragrantly of man, current words, hard, ugly, homely words—wonderful words of life. And through them, their user, more than most poets alive, gets the very vibration of living. He talks United States, but he talks Anglo-Saxon, too, like Chaucer.

One should not be misled by Sandburg’s and Masters’ catholicity into concluding that these two poets have no disciplines. They have tremendous ones. If one may discount their too glib assumption that meanness and cruelty are found oftener the higher up one goes in the social scale, one can find a solid basis for a belief in man. They both believe in the discipline of common sense and the discipline of laughter. And most of all in the discipline of love. They both know the wheat from the chaff. Justice and goodness are things to shout louder about than stupidity and the mere motion of eating and drinking and breeding. They know that the majority of men and women are warm and good and full of the juice of earth and light of the sun. Some of the best of them are the ones who are having the hardest time to get along. Masters and Sandburg are incurable believers in life, by the century and by the minute. It is very good to have two such men around. The people?—Yes! They are the ones who make life worth while.