By ROBIN METZ

Penelope Niven. Carl Sandburg: A Biography. New York Charles Scribner's Sons, 1991. Pp. 843 with 24 plates, bibliography and index. $35 (cloth).

As a young man in Galesburg, Ill., Carl Sandburg experienced a peculiar recurrent dream about collapsing horses. "I was on a horse and the horse was galloping in good time," he later wrote.". . . [A]t the split second when the horse reached the gate ... he collapsed. ... He changed from something to nothing. And in another split second I was on another horse of another color . . . riding hell bent for leather to wherever it was I was going." The dream distressed Sandburg for years, for he associated it with his failure, at age 27, to establish a direction in his life. "There are ten men in me," he lamented in 1907, "and I do not know or understand one of them." Yet as Penelope Niven makes apparent in her distinguished biography, it was out of this very anguish and uncertainty that Sandburg painstakingly forged one of the most diverse and prolific literary careers in modern American letters.

The obstacles he encountered at every turn and on every front — personal, artistic, economic and political — were daunting. Nevertheless, in 1914 Sandburg won the annual Levinson Prize for the best American poem to appear in Poetry magazine ("Chicago"), in 1919 and in 1921 he was the cowinner of the Poetry Society of America prize (Comhuskers and Smoke and Steel); in 1940 he won the Pulitzer- Prize for history (Abraham Lincoln: The War Years); in 1950 he won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry (Complete Poems); in 1959 he was invited to address a joint session of Congress; in 1964 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Photo courtesy of Illinois State Historical Society Carl Sandburg

These recognitions were only the highlights of Sandburg's remarkably multifaceted career. Small wonder that he himself declared: "there was puzzlement as to whether I was a poet, a biographer, a wandering troubadour with a guitar, a midwest Hans Christian Andersen, or a historian of current events." As Niven convincingly establishes, Sandburg might well have extended his list to include: orator, reporter, movie reviewer, editorialist, political organizer and activist, not to mention husband, father, friend to many, high and low.

For it is arguably the most noteworthy and immensely valuable achievement of Niven's book that she focuses more intently on Sandburg's personal and political life, in all of its sprawl and restless tumult, than on his writing career as an isolated phenomenon. Lillian (Paula) Steichen Sandburg, married to Sandburg for 59 years, was prophetic when she wrote to him during their courtship: "You are yourself the Achievement. We shall do our best to do something — to leave some thing that we have produced here on earth as a bequest. But we'll remember that the life we live is more important than the works we leave." (Emphasis in original.)

It is Niven's strategy to detail Sandburg's life and to place it in the context of national events. The yearly (and monthly!) organization of the biography's chapters (Niven constructed almost daily calenders of the 89 years — 1,074 months — of his life), as well as her methodology in dealing with 50,000 Sandburg letters and papers, family letters and journals, countless interviews with Sandburg familiars, FBI files, newspaper files, unpublished manuscripts and a selected bibliography of nearly 300 titles, reveals and underscores a philosophy remarkably parallel to the Sandburgs' own. "Sandburg . . . was convinced that the poet had a duty to address the living issues of his times," Niven writes. That is, the poet has a duty to be socially engaged and not artistically remote. Sandburg himself stated in "Notes for a Preface," Complete Poems that "a writer's silence on living issues can in itself constitute a propaganda of conduct leading toward the deterioration or death of freedom." And on another occasion he wrote: "Poetry is written out of tumults and paradoxes, terrible reckless struggle and glorious lazy loafing, out of blood, work and war and out of baseball, babies and potato blossoms." For more than seven decades (Sandburg was 89 at his death in 1967), the life around him, and the literature, and the living issues, and the felt life within were inextricably woven.

Some might argue, however, that Niven's approach is self-effacing to a fault. It is certainly true that her presence is more steadfastly felt in the confident gleaning of original research materials than in the leverage an interpretive theory often provides. But restraint may be the key to Niven's success, providing us a lens through which to view both a significant American writer and the complex cultural forces that challenged and shaped him.

As Paula Sandburg said at the time of her husband's death: "He had a beautiful passing .... Now he belongs to the world." We can be grateful to Penelope Niven for reminding us.

Robin Metz is professor of English at Knox College, where he teaches modern American literature and creative writing. His short stories and poems have appeared nationally in numerous magazines.