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
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.
A baby is God's opinion that life should go on.
I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes, so live not in your yesterdays, no just for tomorrow, but in the here and now. Keep moving and forget the post mortems; and remember, no one can get the jump on the future.
A man may be born, but in order to be born he must first die, and in order to die he must first awake.
I make it clear why I write as I do and why other poets write as they do. After hundreds of experiments I decided to go my own way in style and see what would happen.
Poetry is an art practiced with the terribly plastic material of human language.
The sea is always the same: and yet the sea always changes.
I am the people the mob the crowd the mass. Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?
Alike and ever alike, we are on all continents in the need of love, food, clothing, work, speech, worship, sleep, games, dancing, fun. From tropics to arctics humanity live with these needs so alike, so inexorably alike.
Poetry is a type-font design for an alphabet of fun, hate, love, death.
The peace of great books be for you, Stains of pressed clover leaves on pages, Bleach of the light of years held in leather.
Often I look back and see that I had been many kinds of a fool-and that I had been happy in being this or that kind of fool.
Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child.
Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo,/ Shovel them under and let me work -/ I am the grass; I cover all.