SOURCE: Crowder, Richard H. “Carl Sandburg's Influence on Modern Poetry.” Western Illinois Regional Studies 1, no. 1 (spring 1978): 45-64.

In the following essay, Crowder claims that Sandburg's impact on American poets and poetry is greater than most critics are likely to admit.

In 1914 critical readers (as well as uncritical) found in Sandburg some disturbing departures from the poems they were accustomed to enjoy. Stephen Crane, it is true, had experimented, but he was dead. That eternal sophomore, Richard Hovey, had written innocuously of wanderers, lovers, and comrades, but he too was dead. James Whitcomb Riley had long before run out of steam with a few stilted sonnets commemorating his departed friends, and he too would be dead in two years. Lizette Woodworth Reese, Louise Imogen Guiney, Edith Matilda Thomas, Anna Hempstead Branch, Josephine Preston Peabody—all these three-named ladies and more like them had been providing devourers of verse with...