Library of Congress lectures II; Episode 4 of 9

National Educational radio takes pleasure in introducing one of the series of recorded lectures and greetings from the Library of Congress in Washington. The lectures were given in cooperation with the Gertrude Clark with all poetry and literature off on to the library today. Mark Van Doren will deliver an address in memory of Carl Sandburg. It will be introduced by the director of the reference department at the Library of Congress Dr. Roy P. Bassler. It is a very great honor and pleasure this evening for me to introduce our speaker of the evening Mark Van Doren. He is no stranger to the Library of Congress. He doesn't really need an introduction. If I tried to enumerate all of his publications and his honors and even abbreviate the years of teaching and all of the great contributions he has made to the

cultural life of our country it would take longer than I hope he will take in talking about ourselves. I said he is no stranger to us here. As far as I know. I know that he became officially a part of the library's family nearly a quarter of a century ago when he and Carl Sandburg were among the first group of what were then called fellows in American letters of the Library of Congress appointed by Archibald MacLeish. During the day the reign of Alan Tate is consultant and boy Ralph Nader was. Since I have been here at the Library of Congress Mark Van Doren has appeared on this platform on several occasions.

It has been. Now 12 years I think since he delivered his lecture on law when there's a poet in 1955 at the centenary of the publication of Whitman's Leaves of Grass. It seemed to me particularly fitting that he might. Again talk about an American poet. I suppose the American Board who has in some respects more in common with Laura Whitman than any other of our poets of the 20th century. Mark Van Doren has appeared here in person again when he read from his then very new play last days of Lincoln which was then later produced as I'm sure some of you will remember because you saw it in three very memorable performances by a very fine

cast assembled under the directorship of. Fred Stuart and produced by in cooperation with Lucy a lot tell and presented first here at the Library of Congress. One of the very memorable dramatic productions we have had here is such a versatile writer that I think he has done about everything from fiction to critical essays to poetry. Pulitzer Prize poet. And. There's one thing about him that has always seemed to me to be unique. That. He doesn't fit into any pigeonhole he's not an academic entirely and he's not well I won't go into all of this at any rate. It isn't easy today to find someone that I felt sure. Could talk about Carl Sandburg as a poet with both.

Critical and appreciation and realigning standing because I think as great as Carl is and among the younger generation of literary folk and poets he has tended to be sometimes. Passed over and regarded as an old something or other. When I think he is really one of the truly significant writers of the 20th century and Mark Van Doren is I believe one of the best qualified people to tell us what he thinks of Carl Sandburg as a poet. This is not exactly a memorial occasion. And yet it is. We have assembled on this occasion a very nice exhibit of San work materials on the first floor of the library. When I dismissed the audience after Mr. Van Dorn's lecture I invite all

of you to come up and see the exhibit and those of you who wish to state to Mr. Van Gogh and I do so at that time. Ladies and gentlemen my commander. To AA. Thank you. First let me thank Mr. Bosler for that generous and characteristically generous indeed introduction. I feel indebted to him for many things for his having invited me here to the library on so many occasions including the occasion of the production of the play of which he spoke. I was many kindnesses to me. None I think is more important to me than his invitation to come here this evening to talk to you about Carl Sandburg as a

poet. I will not actually not literally talk to you I'm going to read something I've written about him something that the library will eventually publish. But I. Hope it won't sound too much like something read. The only advantage in writing the text for an occasion like this is that you keep it under control and don't go wandering off to the left off to the right. And they didn't know where but you keep on the track the track in this case being through a very voluminous and multifarious writer. Son by himself referred to the multifarious nature of his activities when he was 50 years old he said of that time he said later of the time when he was 50. There was puzzlement as

to whether I was a poet. A biographer. A wondering troubadour with a guitar a Midwest Hans Christian Andersen or a historian of current events whose newspaper reporting was gathered into a book. The Chicago race riots. This was before he had published the last four volumes of his like him or the people. Yes all remembrance rock or complete poem are always the young strangers. To make no mention of further works that might have made the puzzlement still greater. And yet they should never have been any puzzlement for the first of all these things as what Sandberg plainly was from the beginning. And so it was until the end in 1967. Sandberg was a poet and everybody knew he was. It was something that couldn't be missed either in the author or in the man. It could be in the grace of God he wrote at 72. I shall live to be eighty nine. As did hope to side

and women now may add as did Robert Frost. Sandberg had his wish and the country mourn for a beloved poet who had never seemed old so tough the strength was so enduring spirit so unconquerable his humor and his own courageous love. What does it mean to say that he he was a poet even when he wrote prose as on a gigantic scale he did. The six volumes of his Lincoln contain more words than either Shakespeare or the Bible and they are a poem. But what does it mean to say that. The answer is in the force we feel as we read them the force the warmth and the truth. Their author cares for his subject as if it were a living thing that must never be manhandled or downgraded. The Lincoln is composed as music is and is poetry always ought to be. Frequently it is not

vast as this biography is it never marks time momentous as the load is that it carries millions of details we sometimes think it marches to its appointed and without missing a step. It is here always one of the most interesting men who ever lived. But maybe we had not known this until Sandberg made it clear he made it clear by staying with his man and watching watching him by night by day. Lest some tell tale thing be overlooked some gesture some spoken or written word. Some reported conversation some photograph some portrayed. Some sidewise look. Some mood only to be guessed some anguish some rejoicing some silence some melancholy. Plenty indeed of that and some laughter too. Or any rate some dry

remark that made others laugh even when they thought they never could. Again the linking is saturated with this subject. A few books have ever been. And yet it is never dull for one thing the humor in it is both Lincolns and Sandberg's. So is the skepticism. So is the occasional despair. So is the sense of great things going on greater than even the deepest intelligence is competent to control. Not that Sandberg deliberately reads his own character into that of Lincoln. The identification is profound and cleaner than that. His hope is to understand Lincoln and it is such a passion of hope that only by some miracle could it fail. It did not fail. This is the link and we shall know. We know him in this enormous book. As others knew him in his time Sandberg faced with the problem of whether a contemporary anecdote about Lincoln is or is not authentic prefers the

generous solution he puts at the end for color and completeness. Like your auditors in his history he refuses to be pedantic about legends. He knows they have their own truth even if in this case of that no more than the truth concerning what people thought Lincoln was all of that belongs for him and rightly the result is a tissue of evidence incomparably rich and thick. It can remind us of the Sandburg who not content with writing nearly a thousand poems of his own collected in an American song bag. The poetry of a people the folk songs of the nation. Clearly in the faith that poetry itself is more than a personal thing more than the work of this or that self-conscious man. It can remind us too of the Sandburg who not content with phrasing his own poems in the American vernacular ransacked popular speech for

sayings that compete in the saltiness with the very best of his. He did not in fact compete with his countryman in the people yes he collaborated with them again in the faith that good things are everywhere. If we can only find them in the world for him was it full of poetry as his linking is of its subject its subject being in addition to Lincoln himself. All the persons who surrounded him Sumner Seward Sherman. Grant Wade Blair space Stanton Davis Porter and beyond those the millions who merely thought or felt about him and upon occasion said this or saying that. In a word Sandberg let history tell itself as only history can. His reach was wide and far out. Nothing of the slightest pertinence escaped him. There is God's plenty in that book. It may even be

Sandberg's greatest poem if our definition of poetry is liberal enough to include it. Not that it matters for there is the complete poems too. And once we're lost in that we ask for nothing better. Sandberg's own tentative definitions of poetry printed as a preface to Good Morning America apply to his prose as well as to his verse. At least these nine do chosen more or less at random out of the thirty eight. Poetry is an art practiced with a terribly plastic material of human language. Poetry is the report of a nuance between two moments when people say listen. And did you see it. Did you hear it. What was it. Poetry is a series of explanations of life fading off into horizons too swift for explanations. Poetry is a

search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry as any page from a sketch book of outlines of a door knob with some points of dust blood. Dream poetry is the harnessing of the paradox of Earth cradling life and then. And to me. Poetry is the opening and closing of a door leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during a moment. Poetry is a pack sack of invisible keepsakes poetry is a shuffling of boxes of illusions but old with a scrap of facts. Horizons too swift for explanations. The barriers of the unknown and the unknowable the paradox of Earth cradling life and then tuning it boxes of illusions. There is the essence of Sandburg particularly if we remember what he calls the

striped affects the newspaper man and him never turned his back on facts. The rest of him went on to where there are no facts but only guesses and shakings. Listen. Did you see it. Did you hear it. What was it. He was fascinated by heart by thought he could no end by what no man can know. However hard he tries. Perhaps the motive behind his researches in the popular wisdom that led to the publication of the people yes it was a hope that average man if such a term be permissible knew things that scientists and philosophers and even poets did not know. But lo and behold their doubts were deepest of all and Minnesota Swede had told him. Maybe I don't know so much but what I do know I know to beat hell. The chorus of voices however drowned out that Swede. All I know is what I hear. All I know is what I read in the papers.

All I know you can put in a thimble. All I know I keep forgetting. Ask me no questions I tell you no lies. These are answers to whoever it was that said you don't know enough to tell me when it rains. You don't know beans when the bag is open. You don't know enough to pound sand in a rat hole. But the answer might have been as we read in smoke and steel since you know all and I know nothing. Tell me what I dreamed last night. The people like Sandberg himself. Unlike Lincoln who was his hero had out so deep that you could go dizzy with looking down into the well of their uncertainty. The only certain thing was death even death had a simple riddle to propound. Nothing more certain than death and nothing more uncertain than the hour. There it was. When

smart as you might be you could never outfoxed death who came when he pleased for reasons of his own you would never guess the people again like Sandburg. And again like Lincoln who were positively addicted to the thought of death only the thought. However not the knowledge for death is something we know nothing about till it is too late to tell it. Sandberg's 38 definitions of poetry tentative. You remember I suggest that the art for him was an art of improvisation. The quick view quickly taken not for him the slow careful building up of effects by formal means he scorned the meter and rhyme just as he ignored the principle of organization always he was interested in detail and the best way for him to handle detail was the way he took sprinkles of words dabs of color and

lines until somehow the item that exhausted his attention. Hence it is that his best own poems and they are his best tend to be the short one the longer ones have their magnificence. But the magnificent still comes from an accumulation. Even a profusion of details. Hence it is also that he feels free only when he thinks he has escaped from form. He seems to know nothing about the freedom that flows from mastery of form. A master of form and not a slave killer because he is a master and send back that was didn't know this but he had found what to be called his own form if form it was a fast running series of sentences or phrases whose rhythms are the rhythms of a prose not verse though the rhythm was there and in a sufficient number of cases it was so distinctly and powerfully there that we never hesitated to call him a poet. Of course that is what he

was. And he was a happy poet precisely because he had found a style that fitted his thought. The search of every artist is for such a style for a vein in him which once it has been opened carries him without effort down all the streams of his thought and feeling.