The People, Yes by Carl Sandburg

First published: 1936

Type of work: Poetry

The Work:

Although Carl Sandburg wrote The People, Yes during the Great Depression of the 1930’s, his strong voice remained as cheerful and reassuring to later ages as it was in the time of bread lines and soup kitchens. However, in this work Sandburg does not raise his voice to shout down the pessimists, he does not sing hymns to America out of a sense of duty. His book arises from a genuine love of plain people who will somehow survive their blunders, somehow find the answers to where to? and what next?

Sandburg asks these questions in the opening in the voices of children of workers who come to build the Tower of Babel, and the questions are still unanswered at the end, when the poet looks forward to the “Family of Man” and the time when “brother may yet line up with brother.” Between those two points, the poet pays his tribute to people, the American people in particular, as he presents the legends, sayings, slang, tall tales, and dreams of twentieth century America.

The best and most quoted sections of the work include the one that deals with Abraham Lincoln and the one about tall tales, beginning “They have yarns. . . .” Sandburg gained a solid reputation as an authority on Lincoln, having written a great biography and many poems, speeches, and articles about Lincoln, but nowhere is he more successful than in this short poem. Here, Sandburg presents the many talents of a great person by asking questions, such as “Lincoln? was he a poet?” and “Lincoln? was he a historian?” to which he supplies answers from speeches, letters, and conversations of the man himself. The tall-tales poem is an encyclopedia of laughs that range from the familiar “man who drove a swarm of bees across the Rocky Mountains and the Desert ’and didn’t lose a bee’” to the less familiar story of a shipwrecked sailor who has caught hold of a stateroom door and floated in near the coast; when his would-be rescuers tell him he is off the coast of New Jersey, he takes a fresh hold on the door and calls back “half-wearily, ’I guess I’ll float a little farther.’”

Much of The People, Yes is in this same lighthearted tone, for Sandburg loves the American language and the twists of its sayings. For irony, he quotes from a memorial stone: “We, near whose bones you stand, were Iroquois./ The wide land which is now yours, was ours./ Friendly hands have given us back enough for a tomb.” He offers such homespun wisdom as “Sell the buffalo hide after you have killed the buffalo” and “The coat and the pants do the work but the vest gets the gravy.” There are scores of other wisecracks and jokes, some new and some that wink at the reader like old friends from childhood.

Sandburg filled his book with American people—the real, the legendary, and the anonymous. Among the real ones are John Brown, “who was buried deep and didn’t stay so”; Mr. Eastman, “the kodak king,” who at the age of seventy-seven shot himself to avoid the childishness of senility; and the Wright brothers, who “wanted to fly for the sake of flying.” The legends include Mike Fink, John Henry, and Paul Bunyan, to whom Sandburg devotes a whole section, explaining how the people created this Master Lumberjack, his Seven Axmen, and his Little Blue Ox. Of the anonymous, there are hundreds, and Sandburg pays tribute to them all, from the person who first said, “Wedlock is a padlock” to the one who first remarked, “No peace on earth with the women, no life anywhere without them.”

By no means does Sandburg consistently handle the American people with kid gloves of gentleness and affection. When he feels so inclined, he puts on the six-ounce gloves of a prizefighter (as he often did since his Chicago Poems first appeared in 1916) and flails away at what he hates: the liars who do not care what they do to their customers so long as they make a sale; the torturers and the wielders of the rubber hose; the cynics who shrug off the unemployed; the crooked lawyers; the judges who can be bought and the men who boast that they can buy them; and, most of all, the “misleaders,” who spit out the word “peepul” as if it were scum hocked from their throats.

Of Sandburg’s many books, both prose and poetry, The People, Yes comes closest to being his coda, the summing up of what he tried to say in a lifetime. As if to indicate as much, he includes echoes from earlier poems. There is the hyacinths-biscuits combination that appeared first in one of his most famous definitions of poetry; he mentions the Unknown Soldier, “the boy nobody knows the name of”; and he includes the refrain from his “Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind”: “We are the greatest city, the greatest people. Nothing like us ever was.” Certainly the themes in this book are the same as those running through all of his poetry, his love of America and its democracy, the mystery of human beings and where they are going, the hope that people everywhere will someday blunder through the fogs of injustice, hypocrisy, and skulduggery into a bright world of peace. Sandburg put it all in The People, Yes, and expressed it there in the fluent style that is so very much his own. Not many American poets had a better ear for the right combination of words, and certainly not many could match his ability at writing dialogue, at putting on paper the way Americans really talk.

As in all books, there are caution signs for the reader to observe. No one should try to read The People, Yes at one sitting. It is not a narrative poem with suspense enough to carry the reader breathless to the end. Some sections are repetitious, and in places the Whitmanesque cataloging drones on monotonously. Instead, this is writing to be dipped into, savored for a time, put aside, and taken up again when one’s sense of humor is drooping or faith in humanity needs restoring.

Bibliography

Arenstein, J. D. “Carl Sandburg’s Biblical Roots.” ANQ 16, no. 2 (Spring, 2003): 54-60. Examines the biblical roots of The People, Yes, describing how the story is Sandburg’s retelling of the Tower of Babel tale from Genesis. Discusses Sandburg’s concordance with Proverbs in his works.

Benét, William Rose. “Memoranda on Americans.” Saturday Review of Literature 14, no. 17 (August 22, 1936). Written at the time of the publication of The People, Yes, this dated but helpful review discusses the work as a mélange and criticizes it for a lack of cohesiveness and depth. Provides a starting point for a comparison of the early criticisms of Sandburg’s works with later discussions.

Beyers, Chris. “Carl Sandburg’s Unnatural Relations.” Essays in Literature 22, no. 1 (Spring, 1995): 97-112. Discusses the critical interpretations of Sandburg’s literary works, describing critics’ emphasis on the influence of Sandburg’s public life on his poetry. Examines the literary techniques used in Sandburg’s poems.

Crowder, Richard. “The People and the Union.” In Carl Sandburg. New York: Twayne, 1964. Discusses Sandburg’s skill as a writer, the development of the concept of The People, Yes, and how the work exemplifies the culmination of the poet’s career. Focuses on the importance of the book to sociologists and historians as a handbook of folk literature.

Duffey, Bernard. “Carl Sandburg and the Undetermined Land.” Centennial Review 23 (Summer, 1979): 295-303. A reevaluation of Sandburg as being more than merely a sentimental or populist poet. Discusses Sandburg’s poetry as an authentic voice with a wholeness of perception rooted in identification with the American people.

Golden, Harry. Carl Sandburg. 1961. New ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Examines Sandburg’s personality and how it relates to his writing. Includes a discussion of The People, Yes as a poetic definition of the elemental forces of love, death, life, and work.

Murcia, Rebecca Thatcher. Carl Sandburg. Hockessin, Del.: Mitchell Lane, 2007. This biography, written for younger students, “profiles the revolutionary poet and author who lived as a hobo, served as a soldier, and worked as a political organizer.” A compact and readable outline of Sandburg’s life and times.

Reed, Brian M. “Carl Sandburg’s The People, Yes, Thirties Modernism, and the Problem of Bad Political Poetry.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 46, no. 2 (Summer, 2004): 181-212. Argues that the poem fails to introduce an idea without belaboring it; maintains the poem lacks “the polish, complexity, variable tone, and layered ironies that typify most anthologized verse from the twentieth century.”

Wooley, Lisa. “Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay: Composite Voices of the Open Road.” In American Voices of the Chicago Renaissance. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000. Describes how the two poets use language to convey simplicity, democracy, and Americanness—characteristics associated with Chicago’s literary renaissance