CA. Other Poets and Works

6. Carl Sandburg (1878-1967). Chicago Poems. New York: Holt, 1916.

		The ‘Japanese influence’ in Sandburg’s work may be traced to Ezra Pound. Image of Sandburg:

Hall (A16), Kimura (A23), and Kawano (BI31) call attention to the possible incorporation of haiku poetics in Sandburg’s early work, and Durnell in her survey of Japanese Cultural Influences on American Poetry and Drama (A53) devotes nearly as many pages to Sandburg as to Pound, but the point more correctly is that Sandburg after 1913 incorporated into his work the principles of Imagism, and the influence is more Pound than Japan. Insofar as one can find a likeness to Japanese poetics in Sandburg’s verse it is in the Chicago Poems, a few of which are brief, unrhymed, and culminate in a sharp visual image. Those most ‘like’ haiku had been published first in Poetry in 1914, the year after Pound’s ‘Imagisme’, ‘A Few Don’ts for an Imagiste’, and IN A STATION OF THE METRO (BK1-3) had appeared in that journal. The search for Sandburg’s sources for his ‘haiku-like’ poems, then, most profitably begins, and ends, in those and related works. See also BI22a.