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After allowing for items to protect future operation
every cut in production cost should be shared
with the consumers in lower prices
with the workers in higher wages
thus stabilizing buying power
and guarding against recurrent collapses.
"What is this? Is it economics, poetry, or what?"
-Carl Sandburg, The People, Yes (267)
In September 1936, Archibald MacLeish published a review of Carl Sandburg's book-length poem The People, Yes in the leftist journal New Masses. MacLeish praises Sandburg as a political visionary:
The People, Yes ought to be required reading for every man in every American metropolis who thinks of himself as a radical. . . . It will teach him that the tradition of the people is not dead in this republic. It will teach him, further, that that tradition is the tradition upon which he must build if he wishes to build a social revolution which will succeed. (25)
The American masses, MacLeish explains, will not rise up until they are persuaded that revolutionary socialism has indigenous roots traceable back to 1776:
We hold in our hands the growing thing, the true shelter for a great people, and yet it will neither grow nor shelter until it is grafted to the green wood of the people's lives. . . . What [Sandburg] says to those who have attempted to spell the name of their own cause out of the cracked letters of the Liberty Bell is this: Why turn back? Why say the people were right then? Why not say the people are right still? . . . He points out the one great tradition in American life strong enough and live enough to carry the revolution of the oppressed. That tradition is the belief in the people. (26; his emphasis)
MacLeish concludes his review with the ringing assertion that "the revolutionary party which can offer to restore the government to the people and which can convince the people of its sincerity in so offering . . . will inherit the history of this country and change it into truth" (27).
Not once does MacLeish comment on Sandburg's poetry qua poetry. He includes five long quotations from The People, Yes, but he neither praises nor analyzes them. They serve simply to illustrate or advance...