SOURCE: Loeber, William. Review of Chicago Poems, Cornhuskers, and Smoke and Steel, by Carl Sandburg. Double Dealer 3, no. 14 (February 1922): 105-07.

In the following review of Sandburg's first three major volumes of verse, Loeber argues against those critics who dismiss Sandburg's poetry as merely “tough” or “insensitive.”

Snobbishness is so characteristically an imperishable human trait, it is high time it came to be listed among the virtues. Even so universal an appreciation as the appreciation of literature is touched and tainted by this dry-rot of the critical attitude.

Last week I read a paragraph by Dr. Felix E. Schelling, Phi Beta Kappa senator or whatever those elders are called, and luminary of the Department of English, University of Pennsylvania. His statement in substance was a tilt of the academic nose. He declared that Carl Sandburg need trouble no one especially; that Carl Sandburg represented the intellectual Tough, and that...