SOURCE: Van Doren, Mark. Introduction to Carl Sandburg: A Bibliography of Sandburg Materials in the Collections of the Library of Congress, pp. 1-15. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1969.

In the following essay, Van Doren assesses Sandburg's varied poetic talent and accomplishments.

When he was fifty, Carl Sandburg once said, “there was puzzlement as to whether I was a poet, a biographer, a wandering troubadour with a guitar, a midwest Hans Christian Andersen, or a historian of current events whose newspaper reporting was gathered into a book, The Chicago Race Riots.” This was before he had published the last four volumes of his Abraham Lincoln, or The People, Yes, or Remembrance Rock, or Complete Poems, or Always the Young Strangers, to make no mention of further works that might have made the puzzlement still greater. And yet there should never have been any puzzlement, for the first of all...