Carl Sandburg: People, Yes; Religion, Maybe

January 6, 1980
Lakeland

January 13, 1980
Port Charlotte

Carl Sandburg: People, Yes; Religion, Maybe

On this day (January 6) 102 years ago, Carl Sandburg was born. He died, July 23, 1967 at the age of 89.

Son of Swedish immigrants, he began work at 13 in his native city, Galesburg, Illinois, working on a milk wagon. During the next few years, he rode the rails as a hobo, dropping off the freight trains at numerous places in this land to work as a porter in a hotel; he shifted scenery in theatre; truck driver, worked on a railroad construction gang; pitched hay in Kansas wheat fields; soldiered in the Spanish-American War.

Following 8 months’ service in Puerto Rico, he went back to college – Lombard, a Universalist college in Galesburg. he worked his way through as a janitor, ringing the college bell, and tutoring. He left before getting a degree (but in later years at least a dozen universities awarded him honorary degrees).

Then he roamed the Midwest [as a] newspaperman, salesman, organizer for the social democrat party of Wisconsin, labor editor [of] the Milwaukee Journal.

There he met Paula Steichen, sister of Edward Steichen, who was to become one of America’s most famous photographers. Their marriage endured.

All the while he was reading. He was influenced by Whitman, although Sandburg’s free verse is quite different. Most of all he listened, talked, sang folk and labor songs, and played his guitar.

His ABRAHAM LINCOLN: THE PRAIRIE YEARS – THE WAR YEARS is one of the remarkable American biographies. He wrote not as a political scientist or historian but as one who loved Lincoln both for Lincoln’s explainable greatness and Lincoln’s mystic and spiritual qualities. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1940.

Sandburg’s autobiography, written of his first 21 years (ALWAYS THE YOUNG STRANGERS) has an inimitable quality of describing the America of that period. When reading it, although quite different in style, one is reminded of Dylan Thomas’ “Child’s Christmas in Wales” or the poetry of Robert Burns. Just as one meets, unforgettably, the working people of Wales in Dylan Thomas or the Scottish crofters in Burns, so one meets the American People in ALWAYS THE YOUNG STRANGERS.

But it is his poetry that many of us read, again and again, frequently aloud. Sandburg was not a poet – his lines do not rhyme or scan. Therefore how can he be classed with other great American poets – Longfellow, Emerson, Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost? I like what one literary editor wrote: “No one can read Carl Sandburg’s poetry with any degree of open-mindedness and car and not find in them a spontaneous overflowing of powerful feeling, passion, magic rhythm and glorious imagination.”

His “Fog” is probably the best known short poem in our land:

“The fog comes
On little cat feet.
It sits looking
over the harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.”

Carl Sandburg came through to many of his generation as coarse, rude, [and] defamatory of religion. He shocked many. He used slang and his jargon is now outdated. But always he was concerned for people, lonely people, children. But he was untraditional in religion. People, yes; religion, maybe.

He was skeptical of traditional gods and their representations:

Manufactured Gods

They put up big wooden gods.
Then they burned the big wooden gods
And put up brass gods and
Changing their minds suddenly
Knocked down the brass gods and put up
A dough-faced god with gold ear-rings.
The poor mutts, the pathetic slant heads,
They didn’t know a little tin god
Is as good as anything in the line of gods,
Nor how a little tin god answers prayer
And makes rain and brings luck
The same as a big wooden god or a brass
Or dough-faced god with golden ear-rings.

He hated hypocrisy. In his lines “To a Contemporary Bunkshooter” he was vulgarly frank. Many persons were shocked. But there were many of his day who thought [it] was an accurate picture of Billy Sunday, then the most famous and popular evangelist.

[CJW indicates a passage to be read here]

There is no reliance or faith in doctrine or dogma – but there’s no maybe about his religion – it is, it is.

Carl Sandburg didn’t think much of future heavens or hell.

[CJW indicates a passage to be read here]

And again:

[CJW indicates a passage to be read here]

It is doubtful whether the poet of the people had any belief in immortality in any traditional sense. His questioning was reflected beautifully in “Cool Tombs”

[CJW indicates a passage to be read here]

Yet interlacing that questioning is a testimony to the immortality of love:

[CJW indicates a passage to be read here]

For him religion was a feeling, a seeking, a quest:

[CJW indicates a passage to be read here]

He held no conventional idea of God – sometimes he was whimsical:

[CJW indicates a passage to be read here]

Sometimes he touched the human questioning at depth:

[CJW indicates a passage to be read here]

Then too he would remind the pretenders of much knowledge of the deep mystery of life:

[CJW indicates a passage to be read here]

The religion of Carl Sandburg? You might say “maybe” - I say, “yes, yes, yes.”

But there is no doubt that “People, Yes” was woven into all his life as well as his writings: hard-working people, exploited people, lonely people, patient people, rebellious people, loving people -

Upstream:
[CJW indicates a passage to be read here]

Fireborn:
[CJW indicates a passage to be read here]

He was a prophet of freedom, and the arrival one day, of the human family:
[CJW indicates a passage to be read here]

In any paperback display at the airport newsstand, you will see paperbacks telling us how to be happy. I suggest there is a deeper clue in the following lines than in a hundred paperbacks:

[CJW indicates a passage to be read here]

He knew how weak and fallible we people are. Sandburg knew the human condition on the prairies, in the wheat-fields, the steel mills, the slaughter-houses, the army in war. He had sympathy, insight, love. He uttered a strong and frank condemnation of injustice and let hope speak to the difficult, wonderful, agonizing, sorrowful, hopeful human condition.

[CJW indicates a passage to be read here]

People, Yes. Religion, Yes. Happy Birthday, Carl Sandburg, wherever you are.

[Editor’s Note: The specific quotes marked by Rev. Westman are not attached to the sermon notes. Some poems are clearly named, but it is not clear whether he read aloud all or just part of these poems. The interested reader can look them up.]