SOURCE: Jones, Llewellyn. “Carl Sandburg: Formalist.” In First Impressions: Essays on Poetry, Criticism, and Prosody, pp. 53-68. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1925.

In the following excerpt, Jones evaluates Sandburg as a poet and underscores his strongly satirical voice.

In the layman's mind there are two kinds of physician: the up-to-date specialist with his elaborate examinations, his apparatus, and his “air”; and, on the other hand, the rough-and-ready country doctor with his absence of “air,” his hail-fellow-well-met attitude, his lack of up-to-date science, and his ability to cure.

Having made this nice distinction between doctors, the public is very likely to apply it to the poets. It likes to think of some poets, Robert Bridges, for instance, as scholarly, certain, using each metrical device with intention, and knowing just what they are aiming at. And in contrast to those poets it places men of whom, in its mind, Carl...