Carl Sandburg

A long poem that makes brilliant use of the legends and myths, the tall tales and sayings of America. "If America has a folksinger today he is Carl Sandburg, a singer who comes out of the prairie soil... who can hand back to the people a creation that has scraps of their own insight, humor, and imagination" (Padraic Colum).

Always the Young Strangers, the author s recollections of his childhood and youth in Galesburg, Illinois, is presented in a shortened version for younger readers."

Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) is best known for his poetry (Chicago Poems, Smoke and Steel, and Good Morning, America), his books for children, including Rootabaga Country and Potato Face, and his six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln. The Pulitzer Prize-winning Illinois author devoted his life to writing, lecturing, reading from his own works, and collecting and singing folk songs. Sandburg often incorporated proverbs, riddles, aphorisms, and vernacular wisdom in lectures, poetry, children’s stories, and in his novel Remembrance Rock. Believing that silliness and fun helped preserve sanity and balance, he put together a collection of fanciful anecdotes - alive with alliteration - for his own amusement. Now, more than twenty years after his death, the publication of Fables, Foibles, and Foobles truly reveals, for perhaps the first time, the playful spirit of this great American poet. George Hendrick has compiled the best of these never-before-published nonsensical pieces, which include Flies, Fleas, Flinyons, Flicks, Flooches, Flacks, Flatches, and assorted F-friends deep in dialogue about books and reading; the fascinating worlds of the curious hoomadooms, hongdorshes, and onkadonks; fables to rival Thurber; jokes about every conceivable type of nut; and cameo appearances by Hank the Honk and Flitty the Wid, among others. Robert Harvey’s whimsical drawings, scattered throughout the book, illuminate this charming cast of characters.

What is poetry? Carl Sandburg asks in the delightful "Short Talk" that opens this volume. How is a poem made? If it can be explained, is it really a poem? Should children write poetry? He then goes on to present his own captivating, often amusing poems. Dealing with everyday themes that young readers will enjoy, he writes about skyscrapers, hats, tractors, and buffaloes; pumpkins, weeds, cabbages, and birds. There are groups of poems about children, wind and sea, and night; and a number of Sandburg's best-known poems, including "Fog."

One of America's best loved and most distinguished poets has chosen from the vast treasure trove of his published work these verses, which he thinks are particularly suited to children, and to them he has added sixteen new poems. The reader may roam far and wide in this collection, among such groups of poems as "Corn Belt", "Blossom Themes", and "Wind, Sea, and Sky", yet never exhaust the riches of the mind and heart and imagination that Mr. Sandburg offers. Here is America, here is humor, here are the deep rolling cadences, the contagious delight in words and sounds, the imaginative fire that make Carl Sandburg's poetry outstanding. It is a collection to enchant both young and old.

A representative selection of poems, culled from the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet's published verse, plus thirteen poems appearing in book form for the first time. " Sandburg's poetry] is independent, honest, direct, lyric, and it endures, clamorous and muted, magical as life itself" (New York Times). Introduction by Mark Van Doren.