SOURCE: Van Wienen, Mark. “Taming the Socialist: Carl Sandburg's Chicago Poems and Its Critics.” American Literature 63, no. 1 (March 1991): 89-103.

In the following essay, Van Wienen maintains that Sandburg was far more political in his early poetry than is generally acknowledged.

Carl Sandburg's reputation as the adulatory biographer of Lincoln and as a folksy, silver-haired singer of ballads and reciter of poems has obscured the radically innovative and oppositional character of his earlier poetic work. Set in the context of Sandburg's socialist politics of the teens rather than the moderate populism of his later career, the early poems emerge as protests both against much of conventional American political life and against established literary practice. Most sharply confrontational is Chicago Poems, which appeared at a time when Sandburg was active both in socialist politics and in literary circles.¹ These poems reveal that Sandburg was busy propagating American socialism not only...