SOURCE: Mayer, Charles W. “The People, Yes: Sandburg's Dreambook for Today.” 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. 82-91. Macomb: Western Illinois University Press, 1976.

In the following essay, Mayer traces the “lyrical pessimism” of Sandburg's early poetry, finding a late response to it in The People, Yes, which presents Sandburg's theme of “the divinity of the people.”

There were two poets in Carl Sandburg. One was the advocate of democracy, committed to the lusty, often brutalized life of the people; using the common idiom to celebrate the wonder and the worth of life, and himself at times nearly “daffy with life's razzle dazzle.”¹ The other was the poet of flux and drift, dominated by thoughts of loss and death, uncertain of life's purpose, and yearning for some release from...