Book Review: Early Moon by Carl Sandburg

Early Moon collects some of Carl Sandburg’s poems for children. That’s not the only reason the poems are simple. In his Collected Poems, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1950—his second Pulitzer—Sandburg writes in an imagistic, free verse style inspired by Walt Whitman.

Here he writes about places where he’s lived, in a nostalgic way. These places include Chicago but also Flat Rock, North Carolina, his rural home where he produced about a third of his life’s work. Some of the poems can be found in other collections, like Smoke and Steel, so they aren’t all new. We are given illustrations from James Daugherty showing a classic and of-its-time art style that is still attractive.

Although the poems are plain, they are meant for children. As such, they’re both simple in vocabulary but up to interpretation. Early Moon is a good book for those seeking more poems from Carl Sandburg, who at one time was thought to be chosen for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Even Ernest Hemingway thought Sandburg would win, for his long and detailed Abraham Lincoln biography, but the Nobel Prize in Literature went to Hemingway instead.

Still, Sandburg remains a big name in American Poetry, as former President Lyndon B. Johnson said: "Carl Sandburg was more than the voice of America, more than the poet of its strength and genius. He was America."

Here’s a link to the book on Amazon. (This is an Amazon affiliate link. I make a small commission from purchases.)