History Through a Poet’s Eyes

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From The Wall Street Journal:

The “elusive Lincoln is a challenge for any artist.” So the poet, troubadour, journalist and political activist Carl Sandburg declared (in combination warning and boast) in the preface to his 1926 two-volume epic, “Abraham Lincoln : The Prairie Years.” Few before or since have stalked the 16th president as relentlessly—or indelibly. Later biographers have revised, and in some cases debunked, Sandburg’s opus—which the author augmented 13 years later with the four volumes of “The War Years.” Professional historians repeatedly lamented his absence of source notes, as well as flights of fancy and occasional factual errors.

But Sandburg’s work has long endured. It remains the most influential and popular life of Lincoln ever published, with “The Prairie Years” alone selling some 1.5 million copies. As of this Lincoln’s birthday month, “Prairie Years,” “War Years” and Sandburg’s 1954 one-volume abridgment all remain on Amazon’s current list of the 50 best-selling Lincoln books.

An explanation for their sustained appeal may lurk within the assessment that critic Mark Van Doren proffered in the Nation in 1926: “In spite of some rather obvious poetry stuck in here and there,” “Prairie Years” was “amply and profoundly beautiful.” Yet behind the Whitmanesque free-verse vernacular was evidence of deep research. To Van Doren, Sandburg seemed “drunk with data.” But as scholar Charles Austin Beard saw matters, “few if any historians…ever labored harder in preparation for composition.”

Sandburg’s own prefatory remarks reveal what truly set his work apart: He came at Lincoln as an artist. His evocation of Lincoln’s experiences and milieu remains unmatched for its vivid combination of mood, incident and epochal sweep.

Sandburg filtered history through the poet’s ear. Tellingly, he had first dealt with his subject in verse, writing of Lincoln’s mother in his 1918 collection, “Cornhuskers”: “Oh, dream, Nancy. / Time now for a beautiful child. / Time now for a tall man to come.” Hooked, the poet began amassing Lincoln data. He also carried memories of his own childhood in Galesburg, Ill., site of the fifth Lincoln-Douglas debate, where Sandburg had “listened to stories of old-timers who had known of Lincoln.”

. . . .

Predictably, some Lincoln specialists of the day greeted the result coolly. Writing in the American Historical Review, William E. Barton acknowledged “Prairie Years” as “a piece of genuine literature,” but cautioned that it was bathed in “the aura of poetic interpretation…not history.” A caustic Edmund Wilson sneered that “the cruellest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth has been to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.”

Undeterred, Sandburg wrote on. An ardent New Dealer, his 1939 “War Years” found a receptive audience among progressives who believed only Lincolnesque leadership could guarantee American survival. Robert E. Sherwood, soon to become a speechwriter for Franklin D. Roosevelt, had used “Prairie Years” as the basis for his 1938 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “Abe Lincoln in Illinois.” Now he praised “War Years” as another “superb literary outburst.” Sandburg, who began likening Lincoln to FDR, won his own Pulitzer Prize for history in 1940 for “The War Years.”

In short order, the poet became the dominant figure in the Lincoln “industry” that mushroomed after World War II—his shaggy white hair becoming nearly as iconic as Lincoln’s beard. In 1959, Congress chose him to address a joint session marking Lincoln’s 150th birthday.

. . . .

Sandburg endures not because he is cited by modern scholars, but because he continues to be read for sheer pleasure. In my own travels on the Lincoln circuit, I am often asked: “Do you like Sandburg’s books?” My affirmative answer invariably relieves questioners who find him a guilty and perhaps outdated pleasure. Such skepticism never inhibited Carl Sandburg. Writing in “The People, Yes,” he all but predicted his own durability in verse:

This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.

What is bitter to stand against today may be sweet

to remember tomorrow.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (PG apologizes for the paywall, but hasn’t figured out a way around it.)