It’s time to read Carl Sandburg again.

When I was a kid, Carl Sandburg was an American icon. Imagine that—a poet celebrity.

At my parish elementary school outside Chicago, and surely at every school in the country back then, American children read Carl Sandburg’s poems—whether they liked it or not: “Fog” (“The fog comes/on little cat feet”), “Window” (“Night from a railroad car window/is a great, dark, soft thing”), “Hats” (“Hats, where do you belong?/What is under you?”), and, of course, that great, roaring ode to the greatest American city, “Chicago”:

“Hog Butcher for the World,

Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,

Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;

Stormy, husky, brawling,

City of the Big Shoulders:”

(Digression: Chicago is, in fact, the Great American City. Yes, New York is the greatest city in the world, but it belongs to the world; it’s a world city. Chicago belongs to America.)

(Second digression: GO CUBS GO!)

When Carl Sandburg died in 1967 at 89 years old, it was front-page news across the country. President Lyndon Johnson issued a statement, calling the poet “my friend and the good companion of millions whose own life journeys have been ennobled and enriched by his poetry.” Sandburg was, LBJ added, “the bard of democracy.”

Not everyone in the literary world agreed. Many critics scoffed at Sandburg, and many still do. They see his homespun style and speech as shtick, a performance of The Great Poet of Democracy more than an actual, innovative, literary accomplishment. The poems, they argue, are in their essences more prose than poetry, mere vociferations broken into short lines with what often strikes them as an irritating arbitrariness and performative hokeyness. Nothing rhymes, nothing even near-rhymes.

Sandburg, a scrappy fella who’d spent itinerant years as a laborer blacking stoves, digging potatoes, threshing wheat and frying eggs in a diner, fired back.

“There is a formal poetry only in form, all dressed up and nowhere to go,” he wrote. “The number of rhymes all come off with the skill of a solved crossword puzzle. Yet its animation and connotation are less than that of ‘a dead mackerel in the moonshine.’”

He added a warning: “The more rhyme there is in poetry the more danger of its tricking the writer into something other than the urge at the beginning.”

To me, Sandburg’s “urge at the beginning” is always America herself. The land—this land that’s mine and yours and all of ours, as his pal Woody Guthrie sang. Our history—the great, soaring, sorrowful, cruel and yet somehow ever-hopeful striving story of the United States. And, beyond and above all else, Sandburg took as his great theme—our people. The people. The people, yes—that was his central affirmation as an artist and the title of his most ambitious work as a poet.

Carl Sandburg was a populist, in the truest sense of that word. He understood in his own life story, in his bones, that the only hope for our country rests in ordinary working people rising and thriving—and leading. He knew that the story of the United States is, and always has been, a constant struggle for power between ordinary men and women who seek to achieve a decent life for themselves, their children and their neighbors in this land of plenty—and concentrated power. Corporate power. Financial power. Political power.

Real populism. That’s what we’re talking about here.

Sandburg’s best-known work today may no longer be his poetry, but his six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln. He wrote it because he believed that Lincoln embodied the spirit, contradictions, and possibilities of the American people better than any other person in our history—and he was right. What Sandburg particularly loved about Lincoln is how he proved the elites of his time wrong and demonstrated the strengths that can be found among the downtrodden and despised, if anyone just listened to them.

“The drawing rooms of capital whispered that he was a crude man, too plain spoken, too western. But he had other rooms he listened to,” Sandburg wrote of Lincoln.

How Carl Sandburg would have hated Donald Trump and his gang of oligarchs.

Trump has sold America a fake populism, and, sadly, tens of millions of Americans have bought into it. Like all right-wing populisms, Trump’s version stirs anger and hatred not against a system that maldistributes wealth, enriches the few, forecloses opportunity for the many, and crushes the lives of ordinary people. Trump punches down. His go-to move is scapegoating whomever is convenient and powerless at any given moment. All he does is divide us; all he wants is to use our fears and resentments to glorify and enrich himself and line the pockets of his buddies.

Much work needs to be done to defeat this bogus populism. That work entails more than opposing MAGA. We will have to persuade our fellow citizens who have heard in Trump’s boiling rages and gleeful cruelties some hope of deliverance from a system that simply has not been working for them for years. We will have to persuade, not just oppose. That work will be tough. But it is essential.

So here is Carl Sandburg’s contribution: The final section of his long poem, “The People, Yes.” Sandburg had no illusions about the American people. But he never lost faith in them. Neither should we.

.

The people will live on.

The learning and blundering people will live on.

They will be tricked and sold and again sold

And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds,

The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback,

You can’t laugh off their capacity to take it.

The mammoth rests between his cyclonic dramas.

.

The people so often sleepy, weary, enigmatic,

is a vast huddle with many units saying:

“I earn my living.

I make enough to get by

and it takes all my time.

If I had more time

I could do more for myself

and maybe for others.

I could read and study

and talk things over

and find out about things.

It takes time.

I wish I had the time.”.

The people is a tragic and comic two-face: hero and hoodlum: phantom and gorilla twisting to moan with a gargoyle mouth: “They buy me and sell me…it’s a game…sometime I’ll break loose…”

.

Once having marched

Over the margins of animal necessity

Over the grim line of sheer subsistence

Then man came

To the deeper rituals of his bones

To the lights lighter than any bones,

To the time for thinking things over,

To the dance, the song, the story,

Or the hours given over to dreaming,

Once having so marched.

.

Between the finite limitations of the five senses

and the endless yearnings of man for the beyond

the people hold to the humdrum bidding of work and food

while reaching out when it comes their way

for lights beyond the prison of the five senses,

for keepsakes lasting beyond and hunger or death.

This reaching is alive.

The panderers and liars have violated and smutted it.

Yet this reaching is alive yet

for lights and keepsakes.

.

The people know the salt of the sea

and the strength of the winds

lashing the cultural corners of the earth.

The people take the earth

as a tomb of rest and a cradle of hope.

Who else speaks for the Family of Man?

They are in tune and step

with constellations of universal law.

The people is a polychrome,

a spectrum and a prism

held in a moving monolith,

a console organ of changing themes,

a clavilux of color poems

wherein the sea offers fog

and the fog moves off in rain

and the labrador sunset shortens

to a nocturne of clear stars

serene over the shot spray

of northern lights.

.

The steel mill sky is alive.

The fire breaks white and zigzag

shot on a gun-metal gloaming.

Man is a long time coming.

Man will yet win.

Brother may yet line up with brother:

.

This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.

There are men who can’t be bought.

The fireborn are at home in fire.

The stars make no noise,

You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.

Time is a great teacher.

Who can live without hope?

.

In the darkness with a great bundle of grief

the people march.

In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people march:

.

“Where to? what next?”