Life & Wisdom Quote by Carl Sandburg

Sandburg’s line lands like a sideways confession: the great bard of prairie populism briefly fantasizing about selling soap. The charm is in that “off eye,” a phrase that telegraphs both curiosity and suspicion. He isn’t gazing lovingly at advertising; he’s watching it from the corner of his vision, as if it might be contagious. That tiny verbal tilt carries the subtext: modern America is getting loud, commercial, and professionally persuasive, and a working writer can’t pretend it has nothing to do with him.

“Idea man” and “copywriter” are doing double duty. On the surface, they’re job titles from a rising industry that promised steady pay and cultural relevance. Underneath, Sandburg is poking at the migration of imagination from poems and speeches into slogans and campaigns. The joke is quiet but pointed: in a world that monetizes attention, the poet and the ad man start sharing the same toolbox - compression, rhythm, a hook that sticks in the mind - while claiming different moral missions.

Context matters: Sandburg lived through the maturation of mass media, when newspapers, billboards, and later radio turned language into infrastructure. For a poet who chronicled labor, cities, and American self-mythology, advertising wasn’t just a career option; it was a rival storyteller. The line captures an artist noticing the new patron of language - not the muse, not the people, but the market - and wondering, with a wry shrug, whether he should enlist or keep watching “off” to the side.