Carl Sandburg was a great American poet from my home state of Illinois. His multi-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln remains one of the great works about the Sixteenth President.
In 1936, Sandburg published his epic poem, The People, Yes. It’s a powerful work that captures the American people in their contradictory, dynamic nature. It’s a great read. Sometimes when I’m explaining the Benton mural at the Capitol, I quote it when I emphasize to students and—a few days ago—to newly-elected legislators that politicians come and go but the people are forever and the greatness of a state rests with the people and their hopes and efforts and thoughts:
The people will live on.
The learning and blundering people will live on.
They will be tricked and sold and again sold
And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds,
The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback,
You can’t laugh off their capacity to take it…
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for
keeps, the people march:
“Where to? what next?”
Sandburg also wrote in the poem about Lincoln. What he wrote about Lincoln has some resonance today:
Lincoln?
He was a mystery in smoke and flags
Saying yes to the smoke, yes to the flags,
Yes to the paradoxes of democracy,
Yes to the hopes of government
Of the people by the people for the people,
No to debauchery of the public mind,
No to personal malice nursed and fed,
Yes to the Constitution when a help,
No to the Constitution when a hindrance
Yes to man as a struggler amid illusions,
Each man fated to answer for himself:
Which of the faiths and illusions of mankind
Must I choose for my own sustaining light
To bring me beyond the present wilderness?
Lincoln? Was he a poet?
And did he write verses?
“I have not willingly planted a thorn
in any man’s bosom.”
I shall do nothing through malice: what
I deal with is too vast for malice.”
What will we look for in the elections of 2024—candidates of malice or candidates who think, “What I deal with is too vast for malice?”
Let us not be so cynical as to believe there are no candidates in the latter category. We might need to persuade some to jump into the arena where they ae badly needed. We must not tolerate an atmosphere so toxic that those to whom malice is beneath them will lack the support to lead a people who still dare ask, “Where to, what next?”
This is your old KLIK buddy from The State Historical Society of Missouri, Linda. I have a new computer (laptop – I’m finally respectable according to my daughters}. I will send an email. BUT I just loved the Carl Sandburg poem about Lincoln that you shared. I’ve read a number of books on Lincoln or Lincoln and his wife, Mary Todd (“the Lincolns ” by Daniel Epstein).
And another thing about your use of Carl Sandburg’s poem about Lincoln. He also wrote a book about Lincoln – from which – for the first time – I really began to understand the hardship of his childhood. I could not read the entire book – it was huge and each sentence complex and maybe poetic and I still had children at home at that time!