Parenting & Family Quote by Carl Sandburg

Sandburg mocks the idea that art can be summoned by decree. A poem, like a child, must be conceived, grow, and arrive on its own timetable. Commanding a specific outcome is absurd: just as no one can guarantee a red-headed baby, no poet can be ordered to deliver inspiration, tone, or miracle on demand. The metaphor pairs creative labor with pregnancy to stress necessity, mystery, and time. It also skewers the managerial fantasy behind deadlines and directives, exposing how little authority has over the inner weather of making.

The image fits Sandburg’s broader commitments. A Midwestern modernist who celebrated working people and city grit, he favored free verse, open rhythms, and the democratic voice. He distrusted ornament and pretension, and he resisted the notion that art serves institutions first. Editors, patrons, teachers, or propagandists might ask, but they cannot compel the genuine arrival of a poem any more than biology obeys a command. His Chicago poems and his Whitman-influenced cadences grew from lived experience and observation; they sound like street talk tuned to music, not commissioned spectacle. The line defends that independence.

There is also a gentle lesson about process. Conditions can invite a poem: reading, wandering, listening, living. Pressure can refine a draft. But orders produce compliance, not vision. The metaphor of pregnancy suggests that making is organic, body-deep, and partly unconscious. It honors the uncontrollable spark that selects its own color. Even when writers accept commissions, what matters grows in its own season; the best result emerges when the poet is met with space, trust, and time.

Ultimately, Sandburg insists on humility before creation. We can prepare, nurture, and be ready, but we cannot dictate the birth or the hue. Art arrives as a surprise, a gift, and a life of its own.