Carl Sandburg
Carl Sandburg (1878 - 1967) was an American poet, author, and biographer. He won three Pulitzer Prizes: two for his poetry and one for his biography of Abraham Lincoln. The son of Swedish parents who immigrated to Illinois, Carl was forced to drop out of school after the eighth grade to help support the family. A plain-speaking poet with a style similar to that of Walt Whitman, Sandburg often chose American life and the experiences of the “common man” as his subject matter. Like Whitman, he attended several colleges, but never received a degree, except for honorary ones bestowed years later. He married Lilian Steichen in 1908, and they had three daughters. After his death in 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson observed that “Carl Sandburg was more than the voice of America, more than the poet of its strength and genius. He was America.”
A poem by a Pullitzer Prize-winning poet, who vividly exhorts us to remember the lessons of history, and to reclaim our potential to change the future.
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