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.

Pete Seeger who calls it a "landmark" saw it "almost as soon as it came out. Sandburg supported the civil rights movement and contributed to the NAACP. His Complete Poems won him a second Pulitzer Prize in 1951.

Mencken called Sandburg "indubitably an American in every pulse-beat". L. H.