On January 12, 1920, Untemeyer, a writer for New York's "New Republic" claims that Sandburg is one of the two greatest living poets of the times (Macleigh 3018).
             Sandburg wrote a landmark six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln. A consummate platform performer, he roamed the United States for nearly a half century, guitar in hand, collecting and singing American folk songs. For his own children and children everywhere he wrote Rootabaga Stories, and Rootabaga Pigeons, some of the first authentic American fairy tales. He was a journalist by trade; his newspaper reportage and commentary documented labor, racial, and economic strife and other key events of his times. But Carl Sandburg was first and foremost a poet, writing poems about America in the American idiom for the American people. The titles of his volumes of poetry testify to his major themes: Chicago Poems, Cornhuskers, Smoke and Steel, Good Morning, America, The People, Yes. (Niven 399-400)
             Sandburg's vision of the American experience was shaped in the American Midwest during the complicated events that brought the nineteenth century to a close. His parents were Swedish immigrants who met in Illinois, where they had settled in search of a share of American democracy and
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