Art & Creativity Quote by Carl Sandburg

Sandburg sounds almost casual here, but the line is doing two bold things at once: claiming craft authority and refusing the polite myth that poets are born with a single, mysterious voice. “After hundreds of experiments” is the tell. It frames style not as a halo, but as a workshop practice - iterative, messy, and judged by results. That’s a distinctly modern posture for a poet who made his name by dragging American verse away from genteel music and toward the grain of everyday speech.

The first sentence carries a quiet provocation: “I make it clear why I write as I do and why other poets write as they do.” He’s not just narrating his own evolution; he’s positioning himself as an interpreter of the whole ecosystem. The subtext is that poetic styles aren’t accidents or pure inspiration - they’re choices shaped by class, region, education, and the audiences poets imagine. Sandburg, the Midwestern newspaperman who became a bard of Chicago, is implicitly defending plainness against the suspicion that it’s merely unschooled. He’s saying: I tried the other rooms in the house. I left on purpose.

The kicker is “see what would happen,” which reads like scientific curiosity but also a small dare to the literary establishment. It suggests confidence without grandiosity: he’s willing to let reception, misunderstanding, even failure be part of the experiment. In the early 20th-century churn of modernism, that pragmatic audacity is its own aesthetic - poetry as an open test of what America will recognize as art.