SANDBURG’S 1929 COLORADO SPRINGS VISIT
Eighty-five years ago, the Cheyenne Mountain School faculty brought Carl Sandburg to Colorado Springs, where he was “greeted by one of the largest and most enthusiastic audiences that ever assembled at the school.” On January 20, 1929, the Colorado Springs Gazette described Carl Sandburg as, “‘the poet biographer, reporter, lecturer, singer of songs, repository of wisdom and voice of the inarticulate, protagonist for the poor and the unlucky and for the hard-handed, hard-boiled men of the country.” Sandburg appeared in Colorado Springs at the Cheyenne Mountain School on Tuesday, January 29. He was regarded as “a figure of national significance; only America could have produced him.” He was “of Swedish parentage . . . a son of the same Illinois prairie that produced [Abraham] Lincoln, about whom he has written with supreme understanding.”
The article continued, “He gathers his material for every walk of life and every kind of man. . . . He can meet and talk the language of all common men—the fish crier, . . . the factory girl, the office slave, the ice man, the business magnate, the Halstead street gangster. He is in love with the unfortunate.”
Another article claimed Carl Sandburg “is considered one of the greatest of living poets and the most American of them all.”
Sandburg captivated his Colorado Springs audience that Tuesday night—holding them “spellbound from the beginning of the program to the end,” and “his antipathy to the obvious was made conspicuously apparent in his manner of singing the songs of the lowly.” With his “sonorous voice” he read some of his best known poems, “Wilderness,” and “Caboose,” as well as “Cahoots,” about which he admitted that only he and God knew what the poem was about when he wrote it, “but that now only God knew.”
In addition to songs, poetry, and jokes, Carl Sandburg read passages from Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, released in 1926, which had “achieved the distinction of being among the greatest biographies of all time.”
The article continued, “He gathers his material for every walk of life and every kind of man. . . . He can meet and talk the language of all common men—the fish crier, . . . the factory girl, the office slave, the ice man, the business magnate, the Halstead street gangster. He is in love with the unfortunate.”
Another article claimed Carl Sandburg “is considered one of the greatest of living poets and the most American of them all.”
Sandburg captivated his Colorado Springs audience that Tuesday night—holding them “spellbound from the beginning of the program to the end,” and “his antipathy to the obvious was made conspicuously apparent in his manner of singing the songs of the lowly.” With his “sonorous voice” he read some of his best known poems, “Wilderness,” and “Caboose,” as well as “Cahoots,” about which he admitted that only he and God knew what the poem was about when he wrote it, “but that now only God knew.”
In addition to songs, poetry, and jokes, Carl Sandburg read passages from Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, released in 1926, which had “achieved the distinction of being among the greatest biographies of all time.”