SOURCE: “Sandburg's ‘They Will Say.’” The Explicator 59, no. 3 (2001): 134.

In the following essay, an anonymous critic discusses the merits of Sandburg's poem “They Will Say.”

Pity poor Carl Sandburg. Not only is he, at least in Chicago Poems, shamefully driven by ideology (Waggoner 452, 455), but he is guilty of “overly insistent tempos and rigid parallelisms,” “compulsive metrics and rhythms” (Pearce 270, 271), and simultaneously of lacking “meter and verse form, even regular rhythm” (Spiller 180). He “sling[s] a loose, prosy line” (Spayde 108), utters a “blowsy hurrah” (Perkins 42), and is “expostulatory” and “blustering” (Moore 92). Yet at the same time his work is mere “cataloguing” (Walker 126), “mainly a massing of direct details in the fashion of Dreiser” (Spiller 180), and is made up of “flat statements” (Moore 92). And lest we think that even as a “speech-maker” (Pearce 270) Sandburg would have to display some rhetorical skills, show some mastery of figures and schemes, we are told...