Carl Sandburg Quiz Questions
1. Which book won Carl Sandburg Pulitzer Prize in 1940?
a) Good Morning, America
b) The People, Yes
c) Abraham Lincoln: The War Years
d) The American Songbag
2. When was Carl Sandburg born?
a) 6 January 1878
b) 9 April 1882
c) 12 July 1876
d) 18 October 1874
3. Where was Carl Sandburg born?
a) Milwaukee
b) Galesburg
c) Pittsburg
d) Gary
4. During which war was Carl Sandburg in the army?
a) Mexican
b) Vietnam
c) Spanish-American
d) Korean
5. Of which party was Carl Sandburg member?
a) Republican
b) Social Democratic
c) Green
d) Conservative
6. Of which magazine was Carl Sandburg editor?
a) National Geographic
b) Time
c) Newsweek
d) System
7. When was Chicago Poems published in book form?
a) 1910
b) 1909
c) 1916
d) 1915
8. When was Always the Young Strangers published?
a) 1953
b) 1948
c) 1946
d) 1944
9. When did Carl Sandburg die?
a) 7 March 1975
b) 2 May 1964
c) 22 July 1967
d) 15 December 1969
10. Where did Carl Sandburg die?
a) Little Rock
b) Youngstown
c) Flat Rock
d) Albany
Carl Sandburg Quiz Questions with Answers
1. Which book won Carl Sandburg Pulitzer Prize in 1940?
c) Abraham Lincoln: The War Years
2. When was Carl Sandburg born?
a) 6 January 1878
3. Where was Carl Sandburg born?
b) Galesburg
4. During which war was Carl Sandburg in the army?
c) Spanish-American
5. Of which party was Carl Sandburg member?
b) Social Democratic
6. Of which magazine was Carl Sandburg editor?
d) System
7. When was Chicago Poems published in book form?
c) 1916
8. When was Always the Young Strangers published?
a) 1953
9. When did Carl Sandburg die?
c) 22 July 1967
10. Where did Carl Sandburg die?
c) Flat Rock
Selected Carl Sandburg Poetry
Chicago Poems
Complete Poems
Cornhuskers
Good Morning, America
Harvest Poems
Honey and Salt
In Reckless Ecstasy
Selected Poems
Slabs of the Sunburnt West
Smoke and Steel
The People, Yes
Selected Carl Sandburg Prose
Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years
Abraham Lincoln: The War Years
Mary Lincoln: Wife and Widow
Steichen the Photographer
The American Songbag
The New American Songbag
Carl Sandburg Quotes
A baby is God’s opinion that life should go on.
A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one. Genius is the talent of a dead man.
A man may be born, but in order to be born he must first die, and in order to die he must first awake.
All human actions are equivalent… and all are on principle doomed to failure.
All politicians should have 3 hats – one to throw into the ring, one to talk through, and one to pull rabbits out of if elected.
Anger is the most impotent of passions. It effects nothing it goes about, and hurts the one who is possessed by it more than the one against whom it is directed.
Arithmetic is where the answer is right and everything is nice and you can look out of the window and see the blue sky – or the answer is wrong and you have to start over and try again and see how it comes out this time.
Back of every mistaken venture and defeat is the laughter of wisdom, if you listen.
Calling it off comes easy enough if you haven’t told the girl you are smitten with her.
Every blunder behind us is giving a cheer for us, and only for those who were willing to fail are the dangers and splendors of life.
Here is the difference between Dante, Milton, and me. They wrote about hell and never saw the place. I wrote about Chicago after looking the town over for years and years.
I am an idealist. I believe in everything – I am only looking for proofs.
I am an idealist. I don’t know where I’m going but I’m on my way.
I can remember only a few of the strange and curious words now dead but living and spoken by the English people a thousand years ago.
I couldn’t see myself filling some definite niche in what is called a career. This was all misty.
I decided I would go to Chicago and try my luck as a writer after those eight months as a fireman.
I doubt if you can have a truly wild party without liquor.
I fell in love, not deep, but I fell several times and then fell out.
I had been keeping an off eye on the advertising field, thinking I might become an idea man and a copywriter.
I had taken a course in Ethics. I read a thick textbook, heard the class discussions and came out of it saying I hadn’t learned a thing I didn’t know before about morals and what is right or wrong in human conduct.
I have always felt that a woman has the right to treat the subject of her age with ambiguity until, perhaps, she passes into the realm of over ninety. Then it is better she be candid with herself and with the world.
I have become infected, now that I see how beautifully a book is coming out of all this.
I have in later years taken to Euclid, Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, in an elemental way.
I have often wondered what it is an old building can do to you when you happen to know a little about things that went on long ago in that building.
I knew I would read all kinds of books and try to get at what it is that makes good writers good. But I made no promises that I would write books a lot of people would like to read.
I learned you can’t trust the judgment of good friends.
I make it clear why I write as I do and why other poets write as they do. After hundreds of experiments I decided to go my own way in style and see what would happen.
I never made a mistake in grammar but one in my life and as soon as I done it I seen it.
I stayed away from mathematics not so much because I knew it would be hard work as because of the amount of time I knew it would take, hours spent in a field where I was not a natural.
I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes, so live not in your yesterdays, no just for tomorrow, but in the here and now. Keep moving and forget the post mortems; and remember, no one can get the jump on the future.
I took to wearing a black tie known as the Ascot, with long drooping ends. I had seen pictures of painters, sculptors, poets, wearing this style of tie.
I won’t take my religion from any man who never works except with his mouth.
I wrote poems in my corner of the Brooks Street station. I sent them to two editors who rejected them right off. I read those letters of rejection years later and I agreed with those editors.
I’m an idealist. I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m on my way.
I’m either going to be a writer or a bum.
In these times you have to be an optimist to open your eyes when you awake in the morning.
I’ve written some poetry I don’t understand myself.
Let a joy keep you. Reach out your hands and take it when it runs by.
Let the gentle bush dig its root deep and spread upward to split the boulder.
Life is like an onion: you peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.
Love your neighbor as yourself; but don’t take down the fence.
My room for books and study or for sitting and thinking about nothing in particular to see what would happen was at the end of a hall.
Nearly all the best things that came to me in life have been unexpected, unplanned by me.
Nothing happens unless first we dream.
Often I look back and see that I had been many kinds of a fool-and that I had been happy in being this or that kind of fool.
One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude.
Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child.
Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.
Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.
Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.
Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.
Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
Shame is the feeling you have when you agree with the woman who loves you that you are the man she thinks you are.
Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.
Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come.
Strange things blow in through my window on the wings of the night wind and I don’t worry about my destiny.
The greatest cunning is to have none at all.
The moon is a friend for the lonesome to talk to.
The scholars and poets of an earlier time can be read only with a dictionary to help.
The sea speaks a language polite people never repeat. It is a colossal scavenger slang and has no respect.
The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring.
There are 10 men in me and I do not know or understand one of them.
There have been as many varieties of socialists as there are wild birds that fly in the woods and sometimes go up and on through the clouds.
There is an eagle in me that wants to soar, and there is a hippopotamus in me that wants to wallow in the mud.
There was always the consolation that if I didn’t like what I wrote I could throw it away or burn it.
Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.
To be a good loser is to learn how to win.
To work hard, to live hard, to die hard, and then go to hell after all would be too damn hard.
Valor is a gift. Those having it never know for sure whether they have it till the test comes. And those having it in one test never know for sure if they will have it when the next test comes.
We don’t have to think up a title till we get the doggone book written.
We had two grand antique professors who had been teaching at Lombard since before I was born.
We read Robert Browning’s poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.
When a nation goes down, or a society perishes, one condition may always be found; they forgot where they came from. They lost sight of what had brought them along.
When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on.
Where was I going? I puzzled and wondered about it til I actually enjoyed the puzzlement and wondering.
You remember some bedrooms you have slept in. There are bedrooms you like to remember and others you would like to forget.
I am trying to locate a copy of a single poem by Carl Sandburg, “Honey and Salt.” Can you please guide me to this selection on the web?
http://stees.wordpress.com/2008/01/05/honey-salt-sandburg/
http://www.amazon.com/Honey-Salt-Carl-Sandburg/dp/0156421658/
http://www.biblio.com/books/529848710.html
Honey and Salt
Carl Sandburg
A bag of tricks—is it?
And a game smoothies play?
If you’re good with a deck of cards
or rolling the bones—that helps?
If you can tell jokes and be a chum
and make an impression—that helps?
When boy meets girl or girl meets boy—
what helps?
They all help: be cozy but not too cozy:
be shy, bashful, mysterious, yet only so-so:
then forget everything you ever heard about love
for it’s a summer tan and a winter windburn
and it comes as weather comes and you can’t change it:
it comes like your face came to you, like your legs came
and the way you walk, talk, hold your head and hands—
and nothing can be done about it—you wait and pray.
Is there any way of measuring love?
Yes but not till long afterward
when the beat of your heart has gone
many miles, far into the big numbers.
Is the key to love in passion, knowledge, affection?
All three—along with moonlight, roses, groceries,
givings and forgivings, gettings and forgettings,
keepsakes and room rent,
pearls of memory along with ham and eggs.
Can love be locked away and kept hid?
Yes and it gathers dust and mildew
and shrivels itself in shadows
unless it learns the sun can help,
snow, rain, storms can help—
birds in their one-room family nests
shaken by winds cruel and crazy—
they can all help:
lock not away your love nor keep it hid.
How comes the first sign of love?
In a chill, in a personal sweat,
in a you-and-me, us, us two,
in a couple of answers,
an amethyst haze on the horizon,
two dance programs criss-crossed,
jackknifed initials interwoven,
five fresh violets lost in sea salt,
birds flying at single big moments
in and out a thousand windows,
a horse, two horses, many horses,
a silver ring, a brass cry,
a golden gong going ong ong ong-ng-ng,
pink doors closing one by one
to sunset nightsongs along the west,
shafts and handles of stars,
folds of moonmist curtains,
winding and unwinding wisps of fogmist.
How long does love last?
As long as glass bubbles handled with care
or two hot-house orchids in a blizzard
or one solid immovable steel anvil
tempered in sure inexorable welding—
or again love might last as
six snowflakes, six hexagonal snowflakes,
six floating hexagonal flakes of snow
or the oaths between hydrogen and oxygen
in one cup of spring water
or the eyes of bucks and does
or two wishes riding on the back of a
morning wind in winter
or one corner of an ancient tabernacle
held sacred for personal devotions
or dust yes dust in a little solemn heap
played on by changing winds.
There are sanctuaries holding honey and salt.
There are those who spill and spend.
There are those who search and save.
And love may be a quest with silence and content.
Can you buy love?
Sure every day with money, clothes, candy,
with promises, flowers, big-talk,
with laughter, sweet-talk, lies,
every day men and women buy love
and take it away and things happen
and they study about it
and the longer they look at it
the more it isn’t love they bought at all:
bought love is a guaranteed imitation.
Can you sell love?
Yes you can sell it and take the price
and think it over
and look again at the price
and cry and cry to yourself
and wonder who was selling what and why.
Evensong lights floating black night water,
a lagoon of stars washed in velvet shadows,
a great storm cry from white sea-horses—
these moments cost beyond all prices.
Bidden or unbidden? how comes love?
Both bidden and unbidden, a sneak and a shadow,
a dawn in a doorway throwing a dazzle
or a sash of light in a blue fog,
a slow blinking of two red lanterns in river mist
or a deep smoke winding one hump of a mountain
and the smoke becomes a smoke known to your own
twisted individual garments:
the winding of it gets into your walk, your hands,
your face and eyes.