Poet Carl Sandburg: ‘A baby is God’s opinion that the world should go on…’

July 25, 2016

“I see America not in the setting sun of a black night of despair … I see America in the crimson light of a rising sun fresh from the burning, creative hand of God,” wrote poet Carl Sandburg, who died July 22, 1967.

babyA son of Swedish immigrants who worked on the railroad, Carl Sandburg left school after 8th grade, borrowed his father’s railroad pass and traveled as a hobo.

Carl Sandburg volunteered for military service, was sent to Puerto Rico in the Spanish-American War, and then attended college on a veteran’s bill.

Carl Sandburg wrote children’s fairytales, called Rootabaga Stories, and mused of his wanderings in American Songbag. He wrote:

“A baby is God’s opinion that the world should go on.” …

In his Complete Poems, for which he won a Pulitzer, 1951, Carl Sandburg wrote: “All my life I have been trying to learn to read, to see and hear, and to write. At sixty-five I began my first novel… It could be, in the grace of God, I shall live to be eighty-nine…I might paraphrase: ‘If God had let me live five years longer I should have been a writer.'”

Carl Sandburg wrote: “When a nation goes down, or a society perishes, one condition may always be found; they forgot where they came from. They lost sight of what had brought them along.”

President Ronald Reagan stated in his State of the Union Address, January 25, 1984: “Each day your members observe a 200-year-old tradition meant to signify America is one nation under God. I must ask: If you can begin your day with a member of the clergy standing right here leading you in prayer, then why can’t freedom to acknowledge God be enjoyed again by children in every school room across this land? …

Carl Sandburg said,’I see America not in the setting sun of a black night of despair… I see America in the crimson light of a rising sun fresh from the burning, creative hand of God.'”

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