Carl Sandburg Selected Poems

Even this writer doesn’t remember when Ozzie and Harriet were first allowed to be seen occupying the same bed on TV. Other more intimate activities came later. More of us can probably remember the sensation that ensued when it became public that Rock Hudson was gay. Most can remember when Ellen exchanged the first gay kiss on prime time television or the coming of Queer as Folk to Showtime. On radio there are certain words that still get bleeped out if someone lets them drop—sometimes referred to as the big four—and we’ve all heard about Don Cherry and Coach’s Corner. Anything less than live sexual penetration seems to be portrayed in movies these days.

With this as background it seems difficult to believe that when they were first published many of Carl Sandburg’s poems had to be edited to take out the “naughty bits”. When it comes to censorship I’ll admit to some ambivalence. On the one hand I bewail the loss of innocence in society at large and on the other I decry the excesses of McCarthyism. I object to the banning of books such as To Kill a Mockingbird and The Merchant of Venice from certain classrooms but I also bemoan the perversion of our rights of Freedom of Speech that allow Holocaust deniers such as Ernest Zundel to promulgate their messages of hate. By today’s standards Sandburg’s unexpurgated poems seem pretty tame but his response to an editor, written nearly 90 years ago isn’t:

“…it’s come over me clear that the last two or three years that in a group killing of a man, in a mobbing, the event reaches a point where all rationale is gone; such a term as “anarchist” and “traitor” or “Boche” or “Englander Schewin” disappears and they babble hysterically only one or two epithets, in our language usually a tenor of “Son of a Bitch” with a bass of “Cocksucker”. Since some of the finest blood of the human family goes this way poets and painters have a right to try to employ it or at least not kid themselves about what actually happened at Golgotha. Since I’ve talked with men who were in the trenches and since I’ve seen race riots I am suspicious that the sponge of vinegar on the spear is a faked legend and what probably happened, if the historicity of Jesus is ever established, is that they cut off his genital organ and stuck it in his mouth….”

I can’t think of a comeback line after that statement!