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
We live in the time of the colossal upright oblong.
An expert is a damn fool a long way from home.
There will be a rusty gun on the wall, sweetheart, The rifle grooves curling with flakes of rust. A spider will make a silver string nest in the darkest, warmest corner of it.
out of great Russia came three dusky syllables workmen took guns and went out to die for: Bread, Peace, Land.
Poetry is the harnessing of the paradox of earth cradling life and then entombing it.
Poetry is any page from a sketchbook of outlines of a doorknob with thumb-prints of dust, blood, dreams.
If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell
Why does a hearse horse snicker, hauling a lawyer away?
What of the Wright boys in Dayton? Just around the corner they had a shop and did a bicycle business-and they wanted to fly for the sake of flying. They were Man the Seeker, Man on a Quest. Money was their last thought, their final absent-minded idea. They threw out a lot of old mistaken measurements and figured new ones that stood up when they took off and held the air and steered a course. They proved that "the faster you go the less power you need."
The squeaky wheel gets the grease but the quacking duck gets shot.
And those who say, "I'll try anything once," often try nothing twice, three times, arriving late at the gate of dreams worth dying for.
The greatest certainty in life is death. The greatest uncertainty is the time.
Poetry is a projection across silence of cadences arranged to break that silence with definite intentions of echoes, syllables, wave lengths.
Poetry is the report of a nuance between two moments, when people say, 'Listen!' and 'Did you see it?' 'Did you hear it? What was it?'