Carl Sandburg (1958?)

she became son of old with an aslo of spices pum granates and a fine gold and when she saw this lovely land her heart was filled with joy straight away she said I'd like to be a queen in Illinois she's bounded by the wall bash the Ohio and the lakes she's crawfish in the swampy lands the milk thick and the sh but these are slight diversions and take not from the joy of living in thisen land the state of Illinois then move your family Westward bring all your girls and boys and cross at shy fair to the state of [Music] Illinois well the song places you in time and geography all right Carl oh you out of Nebraska one of the Corn Huskers west of om Mahal I've been in om Mahal that's Midwest all right that's Midwest it's at the edge of it what was it like growing up in Central Illinois before there were any automobiles well one thing a man thinks of first of all is horses horses everywhere horses and a man can think of how politics then was about the same as now just as much Shenanigans as ever in uh I was 6 years old in October of 1884 when my father took me downtown to see a republican Torchlight procession this is in gilburg yes hundreds of Republicans each one with light a torch on his shoulder and a flambo core pipes long pipes that blow and there would be three four feet of fire up there a kind of a big fir flow all at once 16 of them shooting up in the air it was a Wonder to my boy eyes and uh they would Mark sometimes bling bla James G bla my father had told me that was the candidate of the Republican party but uh while they were marching every once in a while there would come from a sidewalk a har off for Cleveland and then from the procession there would come and a rope to hang them and you know uh I was a nice little six-year-old Republican I had never seen a hanging I didn't know what hanging was like but uh if the Republicans were for it I like my father I was a Republican and I was for the hanging of Grover Cleveland but a few weeks pass and uh the country elected Grover Cleveland instead of hanging him they elected him president of the United States and he appoints for postmaster in gilburg a neighbor of ours only two only two blocks away an Irishman named Billy Tui politics was as full of changes in surprises then as it is now Carl I've been reading your book always the young stranger and it seems to me that your father was a very strong force in your life well I wouldn't hesitate about saying that he was a more honest man than I have been in all of my days he was a very scrupulous man he didn't know how to write his name he knew how to read say he was an illiterate but uh he could uh very bought and uh paid for he could do a job of plastering or wallpapering he could take bricks out from a moldering foundation and do a job of brick laying he uh uh was a man of many trades when he quit his job at the blacksmith shop with the c railroad he made a good living as a handyman man doing odd jobs of All Sorts for all sorts of people he he was kind sort of superior to books he would pass me by when I had my head in a book on some cold winter night and say Charlie what good is it to read that book Carl is there something in the soil in Illinois that yeasts up so many poets and Statesmen well it goes in periods there was quite a time between Lincoln and Grant and their Great Performances before there came a string of them John P Al gel Frank oen was a great Governor had a genius of a certain sort vachel Lindy Edgar Lee Masters you could name adley Stevenson uh just why they yeast up there no telling some Aras of America they lie follow and then they suddenly Blossom with human performance were you writing poetry as a boy what uh Got You Started what forces in that railroad town or in college uh Chu oh I read things as a boy that had mystery of sound and Rhythm Charles Dickens a child's dream of a star and uh El in the country churchyard but I didn't write any as a boy it's hard to say how I moved into uh what I wrote that I termed poetry but there's still argument about whether it is poetry or not any of your college professors you went to Lombard yes there was one Professor there Philip green wri the man was a mathematician and astronomer a historian a printer and a bookbinder and he was a poet and he lit me up when I think of the word teacher in its highest values I think back to my old friend Philip green WR a professor when people use that word in any ridiculous tone of voice uh I have only scorn for them what did you do when you got out of college I wanded and I groped it's a long story I headed back after two or three years of wandering groping I headed back from a town in New Jersey to for Illinois but I got stopped in aligan I was arrested at mck's rocks charged with riding on a railroad train without a ticket it was a coal Gondola and uh I got 10 days in the alany county jail but that's a long short story four years of college 10 days in the alany county jail I'd say you had the high and the low of Education the high and the low of Education that's that's a correct term for that H was there any American poet or writer her who influenced you oh Walt Whitman Edward Arlington Robinson and uh a group there Robert Frost Vel Lindsay Edgar leem Masters Thomas Hornsby farell out in Denver one of our Great American poets who is uh somewhat neglected the same goes for Edwin Ford Piper in Iowa the interactions between these modern poets uh no man can no man can measure no man can say rightly and accurately with strictness what has influenced you could you say briefly Carl what you've been saying in your poetry what you've been getting at well that runs into a definition of poetry one time writing a Rock Island train from El Paso to Chicago I wrote 300 definition poetry and on a trip from Chicago to Boston that same month I wrote 100 more then I trimmed those 400 definitions of poetry down to 38 which I printed up front in uh a book titled Good Morning America I'd like to hear you read some poetry Carl you must have uh not the favorite poem but but you must have some favorite poems did you read one the sketch here titled [ __ ] oh yes it ain't no lyric at all except in the comic sense perhaps this face you got this hair [ __ ] you carry around you never picked it out for yourself for toal did you this faar somebody handed it to you am I right somebody said here's yours now go see what you can do with it somebody slipped it to you and it was like a package marked no good exchanged after being taken away this face you got snatch of slip horn Jazz that's another one I think we have that here snatch of slip horn Jazz are you happy it's the only way to be kid yes be happy it's a good nice way to be but not happy happy kid don't be too doubled up do bust hard when they bust be happy kid go to it but not too dog unhappy you have longer Sterner poems of people yes there was one you told me about that you rather like called a couple oh yes a couple he was in Cincinnati she in Burlington he was in a gang of postal telegraph Lin she was a pot wrestler in a boarding house the cryan is lonely she wrote him the same here he answered the winter went by and he came back and they married and he went away again where rainstorms knocked down Telegraph poles and wires dropped with frozen sleep and again she wrote him the crying is lonely and again he answered the same here their five children are in the public schools he votes the Republican ticket and a and is a taxpayer they are known among those who know them as honest American citizens living honest lives many things that bother other people never bother them they have their five children and uh they are a couple they are a couple a pair of birds that call to each other and satisfy as sure as he goes away she writes him all the crying his lonely and he flashes back the old answer the same here a long time since he was a gang linman at Simpson at and she was a PO wrestler in a Burlington boarding yet they never get tired of each other they are a couple they very cou Carl I started to say a little bit ago you have other kinds of poetry like uh people yes but how do you write uh do you have an idea and that sets itself down you incubate them sometimes you have a hot first draft and you write it off and you never change a word you never change a comma even and then there are others that you wrestle along with for years and years you lay them by and make little changes in them sometimes you decide you never will print it that it isn't going to come through and then again after your work on it it does come through I'd say there are two wide categories I started writing a book that was to be titled I told my good friend Alfred harcour the publisher I told him that the title was to be that oldfashioned title the life of Abraham Lincoln for young people I told him it might run five or 600 pages but as I got into it there was so much more Source material than had ever been used before things that interested me I followed the same rule with that book that I have with every book that I have written I wanted to write a book that I was sure would have interested me that I would have wanted very much 20 or 30 years earlier in my life and uh this grew into finally a two volume book that uh ran some 350,000 words Abraham Lincoln the prayer he use then later I carried it on I wasn't sure that I would undertake it I I uh writing Abraham Lincoln the War years I thought it would run about two volumes be about the length of the Prairie years but it ran into something like a 1 and one4 million words the six volumes make the longest biography ever written in the Western Hemisphere there may have been longer ones written in Europe Asia or Africa or some one of the archipelagos of the Seas but I don't know how do you account for the way in which Americans seem just to soak up information and and uh uh knowledge of Link oh because he's a Titanic character with mystery attaching to him all the mystery that attaches to the word democracy and uh that other phrase the American dream it's there in him more than in any other one man Jefferson had it greatly Washington too but uh somehow or other Lincoln is closer to the people and he's closer to uh oh storm kind of storm that we're going through now in a certain sense there a global civil war going on now and uh he was The Mastermind of an awful Civil War a war of Brothers David Lord George came over here after his experience as prime minister during World War I he stopped in Springfield and he made the remark there that a civil war is much more difficult for a prime minister to handle than a war with a foreign power and I think he's valued on account of more than a million words that he wrote and spoke in that utterance record of his more than a million words and nearly all of it holds Good for this present hour so much of it holds good for this present hour so seldom as you feel with so many other men in that time so seldom do you feel sorry for him for what he wrote then most of them I read hundreds of speeches made on the floor of the house and the Senate it got with me where I was sorry for them for how little they understood the history that was in the making before their own eyes and I I think Lincoln understood the balance the balances required in a democracy between freedom and that other word responsibility he wrote and spoke that word responsibility nearly as often as he did the word Freedom you can't have one and not the other too many forget that he had such a responsibility about what he said and wrote he didn't want to mislead anybody I think one of his sentences in a message to Congress in 1862 in times like the present men should utter nothing for which they would not willingly be responsible Through Time and Eternity how many of them shoot off their mouths at the first impulse and and enjoy it indulge themselves in Passionate utterances too much of it in the American political scene why do you suppose it is that nearly a century after his death we still have implicit confidence that he understands us oh he was so wide ranging a human personality he had a range from the darkest of green looking at the human tragedy and then he had a sense of Comedy a sense of the comic that ran from rough Barnyard humor onto very delicate IR ironics that you have to read twice to really get them he understood nearly everything in the human pageant lawyers who tried cases with him there was more than one case of more than one instance of a lawyer saying he made a better statement of my case than I did uh a Chicago editor John Lock scripts wrote as to Lincoln in the first campaign biography of in 1860 he wrote he has an exquisite sense of justice he has an Exquisite sense of justice not often that is said of any man practical he was practical and yet he was a dreamer both there were those who referred to him as a one of the most common designations of him by his enemies was baboon and the Illinois AP one time a woman came to him in the white house with a request he seated himself at his desk and wrote on a card and stood up and handed the card to her and she read it and then said she knew she had only to take it to the war department and her request was granted she had had three sons all three had gone into the army two of them were gone for all time the third one was under 18 illegally enlisted she wanted him to come home and be a support to her and Lincoln had given her that she read the card and she said to him of course I must be going I must not be taking your time I suppose we'll never meet again unless in heaven and Ling took her arm and walked with her to the door of the room as he said to her well with all of my troubles I will probably not get to this resting place that you refer to but if I do I'm sure I'll find you there is that manners what out of the mystery and the greatness of Lincoln what attributes should mean the most to us now in these terrible times well he used the word that adjective sober the noun sobriety he did a he wrote a message to Congress in 1862 in December he was proposing that Congress should enact a measure by which the slaves could be bought in the Border slave states that had not ceded from the union they should not the federal government should not seize that property and uh it would make for Goodwill it would shorten the time of the war he felt and he wrote fellow citizens we cannot Escape history the fiery trial through which we pass will let us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation the dogmas of The Quiet past are inadequate for the stormy present will that sentence go for today the dogmas of The Quiet past are inadequate for the stormy present and he added we must think a new we must act a new we must disenthrall ourselves I think that's only time the only time in the million words that Lincoln wrote or spoke that he used that verb disenthrall in the old Anglo-Saxon days a thraw was a bondsman tied to the land a surf bought and sold with the land any time he should break his bonds he was a free man and he and Lincoln men they should break from Traditions they would have to find new channels of in order to get out of their present predicaments and then the matter of malice he could have scorn and wraths for certain abstractions but not for individuals he wrote a letter to a military governor of Louisiana with regard to a current problem ending it I shall do nothing in Malice for what I deal with is too vast for malicious dealing and all the things that he said during those four years as Chief Magistrate not once did he say anything that the South could conveniently use for propaganda against him other things said undone in the north they could use for propaganda but nothing that Lincoln said in the gburg speech it's very significant that he refers to the brave men who died here have consecrated this ground far beyond our poor I forget what is the word there he did not say the brave Union men who died here on the score of Brave it was about even and uh we could do with a little less hate in the American political scene now could do with a little less so malice and malicious utterance and in the world and in the world what comes out from in the Soviet loudspeakers now there is p about it and there's tragedy about it and at times it's comedy they've invented everything I guess but baseball that belongs to good old Abner double day I'd like to hear the guitar Carl I think I'd like to hear some music growing out of the Lincoln period you think Nebraska yields to Illinois these are way [Music] back 80 90 100 years [Music] [Music] and before I be slave I'll be buried in my grave and go home to my Lord and be no more cry no more cry crying a lord for me and before I be slave I'll be buried in my grave and go home to my law and be fre fre [Music] freedom freedom Lord for me and before I beave I'll be buried in a grave and go home to my Lord and be [Music] free I'm most grateful to you Carl for this visit this afternoon maybe we can do it again one day well maybe it's maybe I could say to you what they said in the old days on the Nebraska [Music] prairies when they fenced in with their barb wire the oldtime Open Range it's been good to know you been good to know you [Music] for the past half hour we have been visiting Carl Sandberg with his guest Edward Stanley this is one of a series of film conversations with distinguished figures of our time the series is supervised for NBC by Davidson Taylor Peter Robert speaking [Music]