John Hallwas: Carl Sandburg’s inspiring empathy for others stands out

I recently gave a program on the poetry of Carl Sandburg at the Du Page County Museum in the attractive Chicago suburb of Wheaton. My focus was primarily on his famous “Chicago Poems” volume, which appeared in 1916 and gave him a significant reputation as a poet. He soon started to perform his poetry, especially at colleges, and also won prizes from the Poetry Society in America during 1919 and 1921. So, a century ago — several years before his multi-volume Abraham Lincoln biography started to appear, giving him another kind of national reputation —Sandburg was a fascinating new poetic voice.

I began writing articles about Sandburg’s poetry in the 1970s, and my modern edition of his “Chicago Poems” appeared in 1992, so I’ve been speaking about his poetry and its impact for a long time. And what fascinated so many readers a century ago was his remarkable empathy for poor, struggling Americans, especially workers of various kinds. As I indicate in my introduction to the “Chicago Poems” edition, “The lives of the poor, the laboring masses, which Sandburg understood so well from his experience (in Galesburg) as the son of a semi-literate railroad worker and his own work as a Social Democratic Party organizer and urban journalist, constituted the foundation of his authority as a poet.” So, after he moved to Chicago in 1912, he wrote about something new in American poetry, the harsh realities that poor people faced.

The book has a variety of poems that prompt empathetic appreciation for the city’s disadvantaged, struggling individuals, who often remain unnoticed by more well-to-do people.

In “Child of the Romans,” for example, he depicts an Italian immigrant worker:

“The dago shovelman sits by the railroad track

Eating a noon meal of bread and bologna.

A train whirls by, and men and women at tables

Alive with red roses and yellow jonquils

Eat steaks running with brown gravy,

Strawberries and cream, eclaires and coffee.

The dago shovelman finishes the dry bread and bologna,

Washes it down with a dipper from the water boy,

And goes back to the second half of a ten-hour day’s work,

Keeping the road-bed so the roses and jonquils

Shake hardly at all . . . in the dining cars.”

Some other poems that also present the harsh life of workers are “Dynamiter,” “Ice Handler,” and “The Shovel Man.” But Sandburg reflects difficult family life as well. In “The Right to Grief,” for example, the speaker says,”I shall cry over the dead child of a stockyards hunky,” for “Now his three-year-old daughter/ Is in a white coffin that cost him a week’s wages.” The whole family cries over the loss, but “there is no funeral,” or time off from work to mourn together, and “the hunky goes back to his job sweeping blood off the floor [of the slaughterhouse] at a dollar seventy cents a day.” No wonder the speaker asserts, “I shall cry over the dead child of a stockyards hunky,” declaring that he empathizes with that poor family.

Sandburg is also groundbreaking in his focus on the often difficult female experience in the city. In “Mamie,” for example, an Indiana small-town gal who “Got tired of the barbershop boys, and the post office chatter, and the church gossip” that impacted a still-unmarried woman, then “sobbed at her fate” and felt suicidal, but she came to Chicago for “a clutch of romance.” Yet now, she earns only “six dollars a week in the basement of the Boston Store,”— which was a low salary back then — so she still feels troubled because her dreams have gone “smash.”

Sandburg has, in fact, a section of “Chicago Poems” focused on extremely disadvantaged women—the city’s prostitutes. “Trafficker,” for example, reflects an aging woman with “haggard bones and desperate eyes,” offering men what’s left of “her beauty wasted.” But now she finds herself with “no takers.” And in “Harrison Street Court” a long-time prostitute, who remains poor, proclaims that men—pimps and others—have gotten most of the money from “Every night’s hustlin’ I ever did.” So, in a variety of ways, the women he depicts are victims.

In our own time, as many Americans have become sharply divided from others, and there is a blatant resurgence of bias that has an economic, ethnic, political, or sometimes even a gender rationale, Sandburg’s poetry should be more widely read than it commonly is. Empathy is never automatic. It must be promoted by families, schools, organizations, and governments. (The annual Sandburg Days Festival in Galesburg might also emphasize this crucial theme, to show how pertinent it is today—as well as how deeply rooted it is in Sandburg’s poetic achievement.) In any case, how wonderful it was, a century ago, to have an Illinois poet emerge who was already so firmly committed to broad appreciation for others, especially the disadvantaged.

Writer and speaker John Hallwas is a columnist for the “McDonough County Voice.”

This article originally appeared on The McDonough County Voice: John Hallwas: Carl Sandburg’s inspiring empathy for others stands out