SOURCE: Cargill, Oscar. “Carl Sandburg: Crusader and Mystic.” College English 11, no. 7 (April 1950): 365-72.

In the following essay, Cargill investigates political themes in Sandburg's writing, which he finds to be ultimately detrimental to Sandburg's later poetry.

I

With a guitar to strum and a sympathetic audience, Carl Sandburg could make Harry S. Truman's budget message sound, if not like “Lycidas,” at least like Allen Tate's “Ode to the Confederate Dead.” The hardest critical problem, for those of us who have on occasion been captivated by Sandburg's infectious grin, vibrant baritone, and communicable relish as he literally licks off the syllables in reciting his verse, is to decide how much of the joy of that experience belongs to the score, so to speak, and how much to the singer. The problem is not facilely resolved by reading the verses to ourselves, for our mimetic imagination may be as commonplace as...