SOURCE: Crowder, Richard. “Sandburg's Chromatic Vision in Honey and Salt.” In The Vision of This Land: Studies of Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters, and Carl Sandburg, edited by John E. Hallwas and Dennis J. Reader, pp. 92-104. Macomb: Western Illinois University Press, 1976.

In the following essay, Crowder investigates Sandburg's rich and figurative use of color in his 1963 collection, Honey and Salt.

Caroline Spurgeon reminds us that the act of seeing involves all that man is. It is the means by which, for example, the poet observes and absorbs a great part of life, engaging both the mentality and the imagination in receiving sight impressions, then describing them and giving them significance. The poet as a whole person is involved.¹

Not least in the seeing process is the reception of colors, to which some observers are patently more sensitive than others. Faber Birren remarks, as case in point, that...