The Green caldron - University Library

22 The Green Caldron
for this book for almost thirty years.^^ He included in it the songs he sang
and played at home and for lectures. The guitar had long been a part of his
life. He was ''probably prouder of his horny, string-plucked fingertips than
all the honors acquired ... as biographer, folk singer, and historian."^^ Six
banjo lessons when he was a teenager and three vocal lessons when he was at
Lombard College were the only formal musical training he ever had.
Personal grief came to Sandburg in 1926, when he was informed of the
death of his mother, Clara Sandburg. She had lived for and inspired Carl
for seventeen long years after the death of her husband. The "old man with
the scythe," as Sandburg called death, besides taking two of his younger bro-
thers with diphtheria on the same day, when he was thirteen, claimed a younger
sister in the early years of her marriage, and his other younger brother Martin
in 1945. This left Mary, two years older than Sandburg, Carl, and Esther,
another, younger sister. ^^
Although his writing as a reporter for the Daily Nctvs still continued, there
was time for the compiling of another book of poems, Good Morning, America.
This book made the literary world even more aware of his poetic powers
than previously. Carl listed his "Tentative (First Model) Definitions of Poe-
try," some of which are "Poetry is a pack-sack of invisible keepsakes" and
"Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits."^* These
short statements aptly describe Sandburg's opinion of the free verse which he
writes. The poem for school children,
Splinter
The voice of the last cricket
across the first frost
is one kind of good-by.
It is so thin a splinter of singing.
is characteristic of Sandburg's short, expressive, and homey style.^^ His
philosphy of life is portrayed in the poem "Phizzog" when he says
This face you got. . . .
This here phizzog . . .
Somebody said, "Here's yours, now go
see what you can do with it." . . .
"No goods exchanged after being taken
away"
This face you got."
The Phi Beta Kappa award from Harvard presented to Sandburg in 1928
when he read his new poem "Good Morning, America," started the long list
of honors he was to receive from all over the world in the years to come.
There were four more books in the next two years. Rootabaga Country and
Steichen the Photographer came out in 1929, followed by Potato Face and
Early Moon, which were published in 1930. Steichen the Photographer was a
short biography of Lillian Sandburg's brother, the nationally famous photog-
rapher and plant-breeder. Before Sandburg retired from the Daily News in
1932, another book was published, Mary Lincoln, Wije and Widow.