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.

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.