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TIME: Almanac of the 20th Century
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TIME, Almanac of the 20th Century.ISO
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1930
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1994-02-27
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<text>
<title>
(1930s) The People Yes
</title>
<history>
TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1930s Highlights
Books
</history>
<article>
<source>Time Magazine</source>
<hdr>
The People, Yes
</hdr>
<body>
<p>(August 31, 1936)
</p>
<p> One of the chief critical charges brought against Carl
Sandburg has been that he lacked an integrated philosophy that
would guide his writing, that his poems have too frequently been
mere expressions of moods, descriptions of street and industrial
scenes, echoes of stray opinions overhead in crowds. As a poet
he has been like a radio tuned in on several stations at once,
getting bits of preaching, bits of political talk, bits of good
music, bits of the chattering, discordant static of U.S. urban
life. These several voices he has never before fused into a
program that made sense or symmetry. With The People, Yes, he
comes close to doing so, and the book narrowly misses a place
with the best of U.S. poetry.
</p>
<p> Out of this welter of jokes, proverbs, signs schoolboy
howlers, stories, wise-cracks, the character of the people
gradually emerges hard-bitten, hard-working, unaffected, forever
asking tow great questions that set the theme of the book:
"Where to? What next?" Sandburg puts down with equal approbation
a catalog of the casual heroism of everyday work, the hazards
of steel-making, of mining, of railroading. He records the last
words of a wireless operator on a sinking ship. ("This is no
night to be out without an umbrella!") He repeats with love Abe
Lincoln's salty observations on the poor, sees Lincoln as one
of the people elevated to power who never forgot his origins.
He repeats with scorn Hamilton's "Your people, sir, is a great
beast." Brooding on unemployment, hard times, strikes,
revolutions, wars, he sees the people succumbing to one false
leader after another, tricked and sold and again sold, learning
slowly, always asking, "Where to? What next?" And he hears a
lament of the poor that is unique among all the songs of poverty
that other poets have heard:
</p>
<p> "I earn my living.
</p>
<p> I make enough to get by..."
</p>
</body>
</article>
</text>