Cornhuskers

Cornhuskers is Carl Sandburg's second major collection, published in 1918 while he was still working as a Chicago journalist, and it widens the focus of his earlier Chicago Poems outward from the city itself to the prairie and the small towns around it. Sandburg writes almost entirely in long lined free verse, building poems out of catalogues, lists of images and occupations stacked one after another in a manner that owes an open debt to Walt Whitman, and he uses that accumulating structure to give ordinary rural and industrial labor the same weight a more traditional poet might reserve for grander subjects. Cornhuskers, threshers, railroad workers and the small farmers of the Midwest move through the book as its real subject, rendered in a plain, sometimes blunt vernacular that keeps the poems close to how the people in them would actually talk.

The book's title poem sets the tone for the whole collection, turning the physical labor of the harvest into a kind of democratic ceremony, and Sandburg carries that same instinct into shorter pieces scattered throughout the book, where a single image of a train, a wheat field or a laborer's hands is allowed to stand on its own without much explanation. The effect across the whole collection is oratorical in places and tender in others, moving between a public, almost chanted register and something closer to a hushed, private noticing, often within the same poem.

Cornhuskers reads quickly for a poetry collection because Sandburg keeps his lines conversational and his images concrete rather than symbolic, and it suits a reader drawn to poetry that treats industry, agriculture and ordinary working life as subjects worth the same serious attention more traditional verse gave to nature or love. It rewards a reader willing to take Sandburg's plainspoken populism at face value rather than looking for irony underneath it.