Give me hunger, pain and want, Shut me out with shame and failure From your doors of gold and fame, Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger! But leave me a little love.

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.