"What is Poetry?" Asks Carl Sandburg

"What is poetry?" Carl Sandburg asks at the beginning of his language-rich essay, "Short Talk on Poetry." "Is the answer hidden somewhere? Is it one of those answers locked in a box and nobody has the key? There are such questions and answers.

"Once a man reading a newspaper clipped a poem written by a small boy in a school in New York City. The lines read:

There stands the elephant.                                           Lead

Bold and strong-                                                           Build-up

There he stands chewing his food.

We are strengthless against his strength.                    Kicker

"And the man has kept this poem for many years. He has a feeling the boy did a good honest piece of writing. The boy stood wondering and thinking before the biggest four-legged animal on earth today. And the boy put his wonder and thought,his personal human secret, a touch of man’s fear in the wilderness, into the nineteen words of the poem. He asked, ‘What does the elephant do to me when I look at him? What is my impression of the elephant?’ Then he answered his own questions."

These are good questions to ask when you have the students write about an animal (mammal, bird, insect, etc.). The small boy’s poem is an excellent model for such a poem.

In another example, Sandburg writes, "Once there was a wee, curly-headed boy tugged ata cornstalk, tugged till he pulled the cornstalk up all by himself and told about it to his father,who said, ‘I guess you’re getting to be a pretty strong boy now.’ The little one answered ‘I guess I am. The whole earth had a hold of the other end of the cornstalk and was pulling against me.’Should we say this boy had imagination and what he told his father was so keen and alive itcould be called poetry?"

The poetry was already in that child. That is why you can see a poem suddenly appear on a student’s paper. This includes an early elementary student. Or in the talk of a kindergartener. It reveals to us that every student has the ability to write (or with the very young, say) a good poem.

Sandburg explains.

"Once there was a boy went to school and learned that any two-legged animal is also a biped. And he said,  ‘Here I’ve been a biped all the time and I didn’t know it.’ So there are people sometimes who talk poetry without writing it but they don’t know they are talking poetry. And every child, every boy and girl, sometimes has poetry in his head and heart-- even though it doesn’t get written."  

You can see that the boy’s statement is a poem by arranging his lones verticallyon the paper. Give it a title, and it takes on the appearance of a poem. You often can do this withthe prose-written paragraph. Break the lines appropriately and arrange them up and down.Where the separation occurs it is called  a "line break."

The Little Boy and the Cornstalk

"Once there was a wee, curly-head boy (Line break)       Lead

who tugged at a cornstalk,                         Build-up

tugged till he pulled the cornstalk up all by himself

and told about it to his father,

who said, ‘I guess you’re getting to be a pretty strong boy now.’

The little one answered,

‘I guess I am.

The whole earth had a hold of the other end of the cornstalk Soft-shoe Tap

and was pulling against me.’"

Still, while now vertical, why are these two writings poetry? The one, of course, by Sandburg which includes the boy’s "said" poem. It is not what the poems are saying, but how they are saying it. The choice of vocabulary, the combinations of words -- their language.  That is what poetry is -- Language!!!!!! In the elephant poem, the young poet could have written "We are weak against his strength. That word communicates, but does not evoke feeling. It is commonly used and thus is the word one would expect here. Not much of a kick. But "strengthless" -- that is THUNDER!

You can analyze this poem as to how the "small" poet wrote it because he uses techniques -- unknowingly, of course.  It is a phenomena that you can analyze the way a student wrote a good poem as though the young author knew what she or he was doing. You can analyze a child’s poem similarly to the way you analyze a famous author’s poem. You can find techniques in a youngster’s poem that you find in a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet’s poem. Yet, the student is unaware that he or she is using these techniques.

Why? I suggest it is because we are absorbing the language why we are growing up. This includes the language patterns -- the most common pattern being sequence. Why do we naturally (it seems) follow the sequential pattern --  beginning, middle and end (Lead, Build-up, Kicker or Soft-shoe Tap) in a poem? We talk and write in that sequence without thinking: joke, sermon, explanation, political speech, essay, story, piece of gossip.

This poem is a sound-song of strength. For this effect, the right choice of words is the necessary poetic technique. Easy enough with the Lead -- a line any of us could say. It is a nice sounding direct statement --  "There stands the elephant." The noun "elephant" inaugurates the feeling of strength that prevails through the poem. The "small" author follows with a pair of two well-selected adjectives, "Bold and strong." The two words sound wonderfully well together -- each a single-syllable word that you can lean into when reciting. You enjoy the forcefulness of the words as you say them.

This and the next line are the Build-up. The young artist gives us an action line. "There he stands chewing his food."  The word  "stands" appears again. This gives us repetition, which is one of poetry’s pleasures. It provides a beat. We experience pleasure, even in a short repetition, in the beat -- in the rhythm. Yet, the poet obviously was not aware of what he was doing.

Here the "small boy" does what every accomplished poet practices--chooses the precise word that can evoke emotion.  "There he stands chewing his food." The boy could have chosen "eating." That would have left it a bland line -- "eating his food," instead of the observable and interesting word,  "chewing." This boy was undoubtedly plucking interesting words out of his head -- and surely, like scratching his head, he was unaware of what he was doing. This boy’s poem is, thanks to Carl Sandburg, a part of American literature.

Read Carl Sandburg’s "Short Talk on Poetry." It is the first entry in his book of poems, "Early Moon" (Harcourt, Brace And Company, Inc. l930). The picturesqueness of his language makes it interesting and enjoyable language. Use it for lessons giving students paragraphs from the book as examples of his interesting language. He offers combinations of words as evidenced in the passages excerpted here. His language is delicious. You put the book down feeling you have just relished a dish of vanilla ice cream inundated in butterscotch sauce.

Finally, here is my answer to the question, "What is poetry?" This question is equivalent to ‘What is the Big Bang?’  I don’t have the answer to that one, but I enjoy informing my students that "I am the only person in the world who knows the difference between poetry and prose."-- this always accompanied by chuckles and audible murmurings of disbelief.

Prose trots across the paper like a Red Fox.

Poetry drifts down the paper like a parachute.

Maxwell Corydon Wheat, Jr.