“Hope” in The People, Yes: Carl Sandburg at the
Intersection of Poetry and Politics
Tasha Golden
Following the media binge this Fall on the words “shutdown” and “debt ceiling,” I was reminded of Audre
Lorde’s pointed statement, “We lose our history so easily, what is not predigested for us by The New York Times, or
The Amsterdam News, or Time magazine. Maybe because we do not listen to our poets.” If poets are Shelley’s
“unacknowledged legislators of the world,” October’s D.C. wasteland cried out for them. So unsurprisingly, I’ve
since wondered how the arts could respond more effectively—or perhaps simply more loudly—to the political
tumult of our time.
As a career singer/songwriter, I’ve witnessed the inarguable impact of the arts on political and social
realities: how it can speak to silenced issues (such as domestic violence or depression), and how it often creates
effective activistic communities out of disparate listeners. So I’m often surprised by the continuing and uniquelyAmerican argument that politics is outside the realm of “pure” or legitimate poetry—as if true literature should
not soil its fair hands with the social concerns of the common people. To clear the palate after participating in
poetry-in-politics debates, I often turn to Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, James Baldwin, Alice Walker. But lately I’ve
also been pulled to the national despair of the 1930s—and to the decade’s unequivocal “poet of the people,” Carl
Sandburg.
Not surprisingly, given the literary community’s reluctance to dance with institutional politics, anthologies
of Modern Poetry over the past fifty years have largely ignored anything Sandburg wrote after 1920. In fact,
after a scathing 1950’s review of Sandburg’s Collected Poems by William Carlos Williams, the academy seemed to
unanimously agree that Sandburg’s later work chose politics over poetic mastery—and in so doing, failed both as
poetry and as activism.1 But I believe this elitist suspicion regarding Sandburg’s conflation of poetry and politics is
precisely what demands a new look at his approach both to American “hope” and to social engagement.
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Perhaps none of Sandburg’s poems received more blistering critiques than The People, Yes. A sprawling
work in 107 sections, The People, Yes documents popular myths, overheard conversations, local events, and common
proverbs of the American people. Given its rambling nature, attempts to analyze The People, Yes strictly as a political
poem—without regard for its diverse purposes, or the way in which its unique poetic form effects these purposes—
led to its relative languishing among works of modern poetry. But when it was published in 1936, Sandburg called
The People, Yes his “memorandum … for the present stress” (Niven 501), and as such it speaks powerfully to those
of us filing our own audacious memoranda for present turmoils.
A Little Background
In 1936, when Sandburg published his book-length poem, Franklin D. Roosevelt was up for re-election
following his efforts to stabilize and reinvigorate the post-1929 economy. Americans were vacillating between a
belief that things would get better and a permeating cynicism created by ongoing instability, failed government
interventions, and broken political promises. (In light of current economic instability, congressional impotence, and
the administration’s slow movement on some of its most popular campaign promises, this has to sound familiar.)
The People, Yes entered this cultural climate both as a defense of belief in an oppressed people and a calling-out
of those who exploited them. It gave the bulk of its space to humanizing details that proved “The People” (one
might say the 99%) were more than just a suffering monolith; the body politic was composed of individuals. At
the same time, it placed their suffering within the framework of the progression of mankind as a whole. This
awkward combination of the intensely personal and the evolutionarily inconsequential affects a poem that’s at times
laboriously specific, while simultaneously arguing for the need to align oneself with the collective. It functions as a
call to value one’s individual life and experience while placing one’s hope in The People as a whole. More on that in a
minute.
Sandburg’s ‘36 public loved this diffuse, awkward long-form poem: a “little over half a year after its release
the book had already entered its third printing” (Reed 192). Readers saw it as an affirmation of their lives and
labors, and a testimony to their (generally unacknowledged) necessity in the engine of capitalism. They recognized
in it their own vernacular, jokes, local myths, personal testimonies, and family anecdotes. And importantly, the
poem allowed readers to consider that something of each of them was worth documenting. Archibald MacLeish,
Roosevelt’s “Librarian of Congress,” published a review in 1936 stating that The People, Yes should be “required
reading for every man in every American metropolis who considers himself a radical. … It will teach him that the
tradition of the people is not dead in this republic” (qtd. in Reed 187). (Macleish: apparently a fan.) In other words,
the poem was received as a vital response to a population’s despair regarding not only its future but also its very
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function or value in a society in which it was consistently unacknowledged. It’s not difficult to recognize this despair
as a version of what shows up in our Twitter feeds today.
Defining “Hope”
It’s worth noting, however, that Sandburg’s version of hope doesn’t much align with typical 21st-century
ideas of what “hope for the future” looks like. He wasn’t advocating a hope in the betterment of our individual
economic circumstances, although admittedly this is precisely what many Americans currently pursue. For example,
as demonstrated by some of the questions voiced during the second 2012 Presidential Debate,2 many voters
interpreted Obama’s 2008 proclamations of “hope” as reasons to hope for improved individual finances—as
opposed to an improved nation, a more humane society, a better overall economy. (Whether Obama’s campaign
intended this interpretation, and its positive effect on voter turnout, is for another conversation.) Andrew Delbanco
wrote in 1999 that American culture is one in which hope has shrunk to the scale of self-pampering; that most
Americans simply have no project larger than their own comfort of which to feel themselves a part (Delbanco 103).
So yes, by appealing to the people’s need to “believe in” something, Obama added a powerful emotional element to
his 2008 campaign. And while this was successful at first, the President has witnessed the consequences of voters’
disappointed hopes—even if he never intended to be seen as the harbinger of personal windfalls. In 2012, Mitt
Romney’s campaign fed that disappointment, repeatedly asking the Reagan question, “Are you better off now than
you were four years ago?” Notably, figures showed that as a country, the answer was “yes;” as individuals, the answer
was generally “no.”3 But Romney’s campaign knew it could count on voters’ tendencies to concern themselves not
with the collective experience, but strictly with their individual circumstances.
This leads us back to Sandburg’s version of hope, which lies decidedly in the collective. He does not make
any claims in The People, Yes that hope should (or can) be placed in the possibility of an improved way of life on the
individual level. In fact, one of the more haunting aspects of Sandburg’s work is its argument that hope lives on
primarily because humankind lives on. In other words, we can have hope not because we will one day surely have a
(nicer) house, a (better) car, or a (respected) job, but because humanity as a whole is resilient. “They will be tricked
and sold and again sold,” he writes in section 107, “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” (Sandburg 615, emphasis mine). Yes,
people can “take it,” but not because every individual will survive his present turmoil. On the contrary, some will
“go back to the nourishing earth” and become “rootholds” for others. Those others will then “live on”—using
that nourishment to find a way to live the “deeper rituals of [their] bones.” If Sandburg’s collectivist construction
of hope doesn’t reach the level of morbidity, it’s not quite sexy, either. In The People, Yes, we find no promises of
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eventual material comfort if only we press on. Instead, we find “the People’s” diverse and insoluble stories: meant
perhaps to reconnect us with one another, to construct a hope out of Participation.
The Line Between Credulity and Hope
But can Americans be expected now to trade the individual “American Dream” for Sandburg’s species-level
hope? And even if we want to, how can we sustain hope in a better future when we know that those with the power
to effect change are so often pandering to us? When we know we’re “sold and sold again”? When, as proven by
NSA revelations, shady campaign financing maneuvers, and corporate journalism’s sound-biting, we know we’re lied
to at least as often as we’re informed?4
Sandburg’s first readers faced similar questions, and he acknowledged the difficulty of hope in such a dismal
context, stating, “the panderers and cheaters of the people play with and trade on / The credulity of believers and
hopers.” He even implied that believing and hoping might, in some cases, make “a heart less of a heart.” Great.
Thanks, Carl.
But Sandburg was respected in part for his honest depiction of the local, lived experiences of the American
people: including their learned reluctance to buy into the hope for Better. If his advocating of hope was effective,
it was in part because he explicitly admitted its difficulties and dangers. By doing so, he validated his assertion that
walking “the tremulous line between [naïve] credulity” and the dreamy hypotheses of “discoverers” was worth
it. For example, some of Sandburg’s more enthusiastic passages lie in his reiterations that hope and belief are
necessary for inventors, discoverers, and navigators:
What is a stratosphere fourteen miles from the earth … unless a bet that man can shove on beyond
yesterday’s record of man the hoper, the believer? … Who are these bipeds trying to take apart the
atom and isolate its electrons and make it tell why it is what it is? Believers and hopers. (Sandburg 461,
emphasis mine)
In other words, yes: belief and hope may get us cheated, sold, pandered and lied to. But they are necessary for
humanity’s most powerful discoveries. They take humankind to the edges of what it knows about what it can be.
And so we take the risk: knowing that if it fails, we will still be nourishing an inevitable Next.
But Is this Hope?
In America in 2014, it’s difficult to imagine that such a construction can effectively operate as hope. For
one, we may recoil from “participation in a collective”—an idea that often lives in our cultural imagination near
“submission” and “dependence.” We might reasonably ask, Are we to just be happily swallowed by a collective that is
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somehow more—and more important—than ourselves? What if we simply cannot buy into the “betterness” of concerning ourselves with
the composite human experience?
Granted, few public voices could respectably argue such ideas. And this is where we catch Sandburg’s poetic
audacity: his confident stride into political and economic arenas, admonishing with the authority of a prophet,
presuming to speak both to and for the American People. We could dismiss this as hilarious if it hadn’t resonated—
deeply—with thousands of readers in the thirties. In the absence of confidence in religious, political, and social
elites, it was poetry that spoke believably to American readers, that articulated the disingenuousness of political
promises for material fortune by acknowledging the only hope truly available: the hope based on the unfolding of
human experience. Poetry did what journalism and politicians could not: It told the truth.
In addition, as if to support his argument that the collective is worthy of hope, Sandburg bookended The
People, Yes with references to the cosmic. Section 1 depicts winds and fog at the beginning of time, which meld into
persons walking with bundles and asking, “Where to now? What next?” Much later, Sandburg closes his poem with
a similar gesture, saying,
Man is a long time coming
…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?” (Sandburg 617)
By framing his work with these images, Sandburg reminds readers that whether we buy into his version of hope
or not, we will be swallowed by history; we will all “take the earth as a tomb of rest” (Sandburg 616). Thus, the
question is not whether we’ll eventually be swallowed by the unspeakable sweep of human history; the question
is whether we will find hope in this ongoing propulsion—and whether we’ll choose to see our current work in its
context.
Value vs. Hope
But we can now back up just a little. In spite of Sandburg’s emphasis on hope in the collective, we do read
in The People, Yes an implication that the individual is significant. Sandburg went to great lengths—a couple hundred
pages!—to collect evidence of the individual: to represent and celebrate her, to document and display her. And the
poem’s very incessant, discursive nature is, I believe, a nod to the diversity of the human race, the inability to make
it all cohere, the innumerable stories worthy of in some way being told.
However, according to Sandburg, individual stories and achievements are generally unworthy of hope—
because they will not survive. Instead, what does survive is a vast collection of biographies, comprising our stories,
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occupations, dreams, and sufferings. And, while our names may not endure along with them (note that none of
Sandburg’s collected anecdotes, lyrics, records, or lists is credited to anyone), our experiences will inevitably, to some
extent, impact language, culture, society, the economy, the earth itself.
So if we are to take any cues from Sandburg’s “memorandum on the present stress,” it may be that we can
have hope—even in a cynical age—in the fact that the collective will absorb our stories, carrying them into a “Next”
that is forever affected by our having been. Sandburg adds to this certainty the ideal that humanity’s “endless
yearnings for the beyond” will eventually manifest themselves as a better world (Sandburg 616). In other words,
knowing that there will be a future can be itself a source of hope. But the greater hope is of course that the future
will be better than the present, and that our individual participation in the ongoing story of humanity will in some
way help make that “better” possible.
Until then, there may be a Whitman-esque exultation available to those who imagine themselves as part of
this dogged movement forward. Sandburg describes The People as the “old anvil” against which “many hammers
of disappointment and oppression have broken” (107). He acknowledges the “grim line of poverty” and the
“humdrum bidding of work and food,” pointing out that even in the midst of these, “the reaching is alive” for what
lies beyond. It will take more to destroy the human race than unemployment, dishonest corporations, or even the
loss of funding for the humanities. “You can’t laugh off [our] capacity to take it.”
Of course, society’s difficult issues don’t therefore cease to matter! Besides, some issues—such as climate
change or nuclear war—don’t leave as much room for human survival. But Sandburg would likely argue that
humanistic hope results not in complacency, but in activism. Sandburg himself was an activist, and his art often
rebuked the dishonest and the powerful while speaking for the oppressed. As such, he’s a reminder to poets and
other writers that what we do can and perhaps should have an impact on current socio-political realities. And while
we cannot place hope in the achievement of our goals, our health or careers, or the fattening of our wallets (since
these are uncertain and fleeting), Sandburgian hope lies in the idea that, by pursuing a better socio-political situation,
we will inevitably affect change in an overarching Next. And perhaps this will even better our individual lots.
Conclusion
Nevertheless, for the Apocalypse theorists among us, it’s worth noting that Sandburg’s hope never relies on
whether our Next will actually get “better,” and certainly not according to human ideals. In fact, The People, Yes may
hint that Sandburg expected the human race to eventually be annihilated. Even so, his readers are led to wonder:
May not the enormity of history and the tenacity of life itself—conceived cosmically—in some way mitigate the issues that otherwise
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currently overwhelm us? Ironically, such a question must be answered by each of us, in the privacy and uncertainty of
our personal lives.
I have not chosen to bring attention to Sandburg’s formulation of hope in the 1930s because I have
completely bought into it. I don’t believe it provides an airtight solution to current political upheavals, or even to
what Walter Benjamin referred to as “Left Melancholia.”5 But I do believe in the model of Sandburg’s forthright,
unapologetic insertion of his creative work into a contentious political conversation. I’m drawn to the audacity of
his assertions, the freedom with which he wielded public commentary, and the energy with which it was received.
And The People, Yes clearly presents ideas that, despite seeming impractical, are worthy of our attention. At
the end of his poem, Sandburg writes, “The fireborn are at home in fire,” and this can speak powerfully to the
disillusioned and silenced in our own time. Like Sandburg’s first readers, we may burn, but this is nothing new: it’s
the state from which we’ve come. We can take it. (Not I, not you, but we.) This is an assertion worthy of a poet,
an idea that finds resonance only in the awkward—and ultimately poetic—juxtaposition of the intimate with the
cosmic. The People, Yes reminds us that if we burn, something will come from the ashes, though perhaps not a phoenix.
I believe writers and artists in the 21st century can glean confidence both from Sandburg’s message—that our work
feeds a collective that surpasses us—and from his rich audacity in writing it. If we take Sandburg as a model, our
role may be to boldly enter public discourse, to tell silenced stories, and to publish our own memoranda on “the
present stress.” As artists engaged in political work, we all can ask, Where to? What next?—and refuse to settle down.
Notes
1. See, for example, Brian Reed’s argument in “Carl Sandburg’s The People, Yes, Thirties Modernism, and the
Problem of Bad Political Poetry.”
2. A full transcript of the 2nd Presidential Debate on October 16, 2012 is available here: http://abcnews.
go.com/Politics/OTUS/2012-presidential-debate-full-transcript-oct-16/story?id=17493848.
3. See David Leonhardt’s report on Fresh Air with Terry Gross (5 September 2012).
4. For the uninitiated, see Alex Altman’s recent article “Who Lies More? Yet Another Close Contest” in
Time magazine.
5. Note Wendy Brown’s “Resisting Left Melancholia,” included in The Politics of Mourning (Eng, Kazanjian),
is a comparison of Walter Benjamin’s “Left Melancholia” with Stuart Hall’s more current explanations for the Left’s
failure to effect the changes it claims to desire.
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