Carl Sandburg: The People’s Pugilist

aLike the Wobblyas favorite son, Joe Hill, Sandburg created a rabble-rousing persona in order to provoke a revolution in everyday life. Sandburgas prose brings the romantic figure of the modern poet as a polemicist, an orator for the people, together with the figure of the journalist as a gallant, acerbic muckraker. This figure becomes a vehicle from which to disseminate a radical vision of modern democracy. The articulation of this modern world-view was what composed the Charles H. Kerr Companyas ahouse stylea for its Review, making it a forerunner of such crucial modernist literary organs as Poetry magazine; indeed, it was in the Review, not Poetry magazine, that the best of Sandburgas Chicago Poems first appeared.a [From the introduction]