"Books are but empty nothings compared with living, pulsing men and women. Life is stranger and greater than anything ever written about it," proclaimed a 1907 advertisement for a lecture Carl Sandburg was to give on Walt Whitman. This slogan epitomized Carl Sandburg's idealistic method of writing ("Carl Sandburg's Life" 2). His belief that a concentration of reality within literature fails in comparison to reality itself contradicts his idealistic writings of hyperreal situations. The controversial impracticality of Sandburg's poetry was a reflection upon the Whitmanesque methodology of poetry, and was heavily influenced by Sandburg's political ideologies and societal conceptions.

Born the son of August and Clara Sandburg on January 6, 1878, Sandburg was the child of indefatigable emigrants of Sweden. His parents instilled in Sandburg and his six siblings the imperativeness of education and transgressions of idleness, while growing up in Galesburg, Illinois. At the age of six...