Life & Wisdom Quote by Carl Sandburg

A poet bragging about perfect grammar, then immediately committing two errors, is Sandburg at his most slyly democratic. The line is a trapdoor: it drops the reader from the pedestal of “proper” English into the lived, spoken language Sandburg spent a career elevating. “I never made a mistake... but one” sets up the stiff, schoolmarm cadence of correctness-as-virtue. Then “as soon as I done it I seen it” breaks the sentence’s spine with vernacular past tense, the kind of phrasing that would get red ink in a classroom and applause in a union hall.

The intent isn’t just humor, though it’s funny in a dry, Midwestern way. It’s a rebuke to the social sorting mechanism of grammar. Sandburg, the chronicler of Chicago’s grit and the dignity of working people, knows that “good English” often functions less as clarity and more as a border checkpoint: who belongs, who gets taken seriously, who is presumed intelligent. By staging the error inside the boast, he exposes how fragile and performative linguistic prestige is. The speaker wants authority, and the sentence itself undermines that authority in real time.

Context matters: Sandburg wrote in an America still anxious about immigrants, class mobility, and the cultural power of institutions that define “correctness.” The quote doesn’t argue that standards are useless; it argues that worshipping them is. The punchline lands because the “mistake” isn’t accidental. It’s deliberate evidence that language is a tool of life, not a certificate of worth.