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
I won't take my religion from any man who never works except with his mouth and never cherishes any memory except the face of the woman on the American silver dollar
Poetry is a mock of a cry at finding a million dollars and a mock of a laugh at losing it.
Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo,/ Shovel them under and let me work -/ I am the grass; I cover all.
It is necessary ... for a man to go away by himself ... to sit on a rock ... and ask, 'Who am I, where have I been, and where am I going?
Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands, and goes to work
All politicians should have 3 hats -- one to throw into the ring, one to talk through, and one to pull rabbits out of if elected.
A baby is God's opinion that life should go on. Never will a time come when the most marvelous recent invention is as marvelous as a newborn baby. The finest of our precision watches, the most super-colossal of our supercargo planes don't compare with a newborn baby in the number and ingenuity of coils and springs, in the flow and change of chemical solutions, in timing devises and interrelated parts that are irreplaceable.
The republic is a dream, Nothing happens unless first a dream
Sandburg's retelling of Lincoln's attendance at an evangelist rally led by Peter Cartwright in 1846, in response to accusations by Cartwright's followers that he was an "infidel" - Cartwright was his opponent in his race for Congress:
Men of ideas vanish first when freedom vanishes.
There are people who want to be everywhere at once and they seem to get nowhere
The past is a bucket of ashes
It was here we turned the coffee cups upside down. And your eyes and the moon swept the valley.
Now is the time. It is never too late to start something.