By beating his head, and displacing his jawbone,
So they made him trusty on the prison-farm.
II
But one day a red sun beat on the red hills
As he was in the pasture haltering a mare
And something went snap in his trusty old head
And he started a-riding away from there.
When he got to Atlanta, the folks took: him in,
And fed him and clothed him, and hid him away;
And let him out only when the cops ai~ppear
From the streets of Darktown at the dust of day;
Then he goes to the car-stop and takes his stand,
And some call him daffy, and some call him smart
But all have heard the one text he's been preaching,
And some have the whole sermon down by heart:
"I stayed in m}' place, and my place stayed wid me,
Took what was dished, said
I
liked it fine:
Figgered they would see that
I
warn't no trouble.
Figgered this must be the onliest line.
"But this is the wrong line we been ridin',
These cars doan git us where we got to go.
Got to git transferred to a new direction.
We can stand so much, then doan stand no rna'."
Southern Cop
Let us forgive Ty Kendricks.
It was in darktown.
He was young.
His nerves were jittery. The day was hot.
The nigger ran out of the alley,
And so he shot.
Let us understand Ty Kendricks.
The nigger must have been dangerous
Because he ran;
And here was a young lad with a chance
To prove himself man.
Let us condone Ty Kendricks.
If we cannot decorate.
When he found what the nigger was running for
I t was too late;
And all we can say for the nigger is
I
t
was unfortunate.
Let us pity Ty Kendricks.
He has been through enough,
Standing there, his big gun smoking,
Rabbit-scared,
alone;
Having to hear the wenches wail
And the dying nigger moan.
STERLING A. BROWN
PARTISAN
REVIEW
Poets of the
People~
HAROLD ROSENBERG
SANDBURG had rediscovered the purpose and the
origins of the kind of poetry he writ~s.
The Peopl~,
Yes
is the best thing he had ever wntten, because It
is the only legitimate thing he could have hoped to
write. His style and his temperament
come ou~ of
Whitman to such an extent that he could achieve
himself as a poet only within Whitman's world.
Having at length realized this, he had conscio~sly
dedicated his book to Whitman's old inexhaustible
theme: the American people.
The People, Yes
is a
long poem about life in America;
one might even
say it is an endless poem-since any reader who
knows anything about American department-stores,
road-workers,
police-courts,
wise guys, ministers,
geography,
automobile parts, street stuff or news-
paper stuff, can add as much as he likes to the book.
All the forms our modern American poetry has
devised for itself find a natural setting within this
3
00
page panorama.
There is the conversational
dialect of the "free verse" movement:
Who shall speak for the people?
Who knows the works from A to
Z;
the list or catalogue of the "objectivists":
Who knows the people, the migratory harvest
hands and berry pickers, the loan shark vic-
tims, the installment
house wolves, etc.;
the reiterated statement:
The sea mo·ves always, the wind move always.
They want and want there is no end to their
wanting;
as well as the isolated image, the scientific phrase,
prose rhythms,
literal quotations.
One had almost
forgotten that Sandburg was so modern.
For a period of some ten years, American poetry
had been mainly devoted to a refinement of these
forms:
Cummings performed atmospheric stunts
with barroom slang; Marianne Moore plastered her
verse like an overseas trunk with quotations from
many sources in order to suggest a broad world of
fact and values: Pound's and Eliot's museums con-
tained documents,
tales, and verbal specimens ga-
thered from a whole jungle of history; Williams,
who remained in his own backyard,
polished his
images down to the finest particle ; Fearing learned
how to tune up newspaper facts into a metropolitan
tabloid with the headlines dashingly spotted. Com-
pared with the streamlined poetic machinery man-
• The People, Yes,
by Carl Sandburg. Harcourt, Brace. $2.50.
Selected Poems
0/
Fachel Lindsay.
The Macmillan Co. $1.50.
21
