Slabs of the Sunburnt West: Early Poetry of Carl Sandburg

Written by Carl Sandburg

Narrated by Robert Bethune

This is Carl Sandburg's fourth collection of poetry.

His signature style, a rough-and-ready free verse that often transforms into poetic prose, is in full view.

Like Whitman before him and like Masters and Frost in his own time, he puts his focus directly on life as he sees it around him, life in the rough-and-tumble Chicago of the early 20th century and life in the American West, at a time when that wild country was finally succumbing to civilization.

Sandburg can be emotionally brutal; he writes of death with a rare and unflinching directness. He can also be emotionally transcendent, writing of the beauty of the world with a soaring eye. Sandburg is a newspaperman turned poet, or perhaps a poet turned journalist; his writing has the direct immediacy of the daily beat.

There is nothing dated about his work; in fact, he speaks to us today as if he wrote today, hitting fundamentals about the way we live with clarity and force.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Freshwater Seas
• Release date: Feb 18, 2011
• ISBN: 9781933311555

Carl Sandburg

Carl Sandburg was an American poet, biographer, journalist, and editor. He is the recipient of 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 his volumes of collected verse, including Chicago Poems (1916), Cornhuskers (1918), and Smoke and Steel (1920). 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,” and, upon his death in 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson said about the writer: “Carl Sandburg was more than the voice of America, more than the poet of its strength and genius. He was America.”