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
I cried over beautiful things, knowing no beautiful thing lasts.
And how should a beautiful, ignorant stream of water know it heads for an early release — out across the desert, running toward the Gulf, below sea level, to murmur its lullaby, and see the Imperial Valley rise out of burning sand with cotton blossoms, wheat, watermelons, roses, how should it know?
Under the summer roses When the flagrant crimson Lurks in the dusk Of the wild red leaves, Love, with little hands, Comes and touches you With a thousand memories, And asks you Beautiful, unanswerable questions.
I am an idealist. I believe in everything — I am only looking for proofs.
What if someone gave a war & Nobody came? / Life would ring the bells of Ecstasy and Forever be Itself again.
There is no song to your singing.
What else have I done nearly all my life than go hungry and go on singing?
Time says hush: by the gong of time you live. Listen and you hear time saying you were silent long before you came to life and you will again be silent long after you leave it, why not be a little silent now? Hush yourself, noisy little man. Time hushes all: the gong of time rang for you to come out of the hush and you were born. The gong of time will ring for you to go back to the same hush you came from. Winners and losers, the weak and the strong, those who say little and try to say it well, and those who babble and prattle their lives away, time hushes all.
Hope is an echo, hope ties itself yonder, yonder.
Poetry is a series of explanations of life, fading off into horizons too swift for explanations.
People lie because they don't remember clear what they saw. People lie because they can't help making a story better than it was the way it happened.
The machine yes the machine never wastes anybody's time never watches the foreman never talks back.
I have in later years taken to Euclid, Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, in an elemental way.
There are 10 men in me and I do not know or understand one of them.