Carl Sandburg
Carl Sandburg
Carl Sandburgwas an American poet, writer, and editor who won three Pulitzer Prizes: two for his poetry and one for his biography of Abraham Lincoln. During his lifetime, Sandburg was widely regarded as "a major figure in contemporary literature", especially for volumes of his collected verse, including Chicago Poems, Cornhuskers, and Smoke and Steel. He enjoyed "unrivaled appeal as a poet in his day, perhaps because the breadth of his experiences connected him with so many strands of American life",...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth6 January 1878
CountryUnited States of America
The wind bit hard at Valley Forge one Christmas. Soldiers tied rags on their feet. Red footprints wrote on the snow . . .
The woman named Tomorrow sits with a hairpin in her teeth and takes her time
Poetry is an exhibit of one pendulum connecting with other and unseen pendulums inside and outside the one seen.
Poetry is the report of a nuance between two moments, when people say, 'Listen!' and 'Did you see it?' 'Did you hear it? What was it?'
The squeaky wheel gets the grease but the quacking duck gets shot.
Why does a hearse horse snicker, hauling a lawyer away?
If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell
Money buys everything except love, personality, freedom, immortality, silence, peace.
The impact of television on our culture is. . . indescribable. There's a certain sense in which it is nearly as important as the invention of printing.
I am an idealist. I believe in everything — I am only looking for proofs.
Come clean with a child heart Laugh as peaches in the summer wind Let rain on a house roof be a song Let the writing on your face be a smell of apple orchards on late June.
I asked the professors who teach the meaning of life to tell me what is happiness. And I went to famous executives who boss the work of thousands of men. They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though I was trying to fool with them. And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along the Desplaines river and I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with their women and children and a keg of beer and an accordion.
We had two grand antique professors who had been teaching at Lombard since before I was born.
We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.