Carl Sandburg: Long Lost Poem
A Long Lost Poem by Carl Sandburg: “The Four Winds Will Have Us All”
In 1919, Carl Sandburg wrote a poem for his friends at the Chicago Daily News. At that time, the poem was read to a close circle of Sandburg’s friends at Schlogl’s Bar, around the corner from the Daily News offices. The occasion was the departure of two of the friends. The poem was then lost among Sandburg’s mass of other papers. In 1967, this poem re-emerged, and it was read, for only the second time, at the Overseas Press Club in New York City. The occasion this time was a Tribute to Carl Sandburg, who had recently died. At that time, the poem was published in newspapers across the country in a syndicated column by Stanley Johnson of the Associated Press.
Even though it was widely published, the poem was lost again. (For example, this poem is not in The
Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg: Revised and Expanded Edition,2 which was published in 1970, three
years after the poem was first published in newspapers.)
The purpose of this article is to re-reveal this poem to the world and make it widely known once and for all.