"Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away"
About this Quote
Sandburg makes poetry sound less like a polished artifact and more like a haunting: a “phantom script” that’s felt before it’s fully understood. The phrase is doing double duty. “Script” suggests instruction, a set of cues that could teach you something practical. “Phantom” cancels that certainty, implying the lesson is always half-absent, glimpsed out of the corner of the mind. Poetry, in other words, isn’t a manual; it’s a choreography of meaning that refuses to hold still.
The rainbow is an inspired test case because it’s both scientific and mythic. We can explain refraction, sure, but the lived experience of a rainbow is stubbornly emotional: sudden, public, and oddly private. By claiming poetry tells “how rainbows are made,” Sandburg nods to poetry’s appetite for origins, for turning raw perception into a story you can carry. Then he tightens the screw with “and why they go away.” That “why” isn’t physics; it’s grief, impermanence, the ache of beauty that doesn’t sign a lease.
Context matters: Sandburg wrote in a distinctly American, early-20th-century key, suspicious of elite ornament but devoted to plainspoken wonder. He’s not defending poetry as a luxury. He’s pitching it as our best language for transient phenomena - love, labor, hope, nationhood - the bright arcs we recognize only as they’re already fading. Poetry becomes the ghostwriter of experience, handing us explanations that don’t solve the mystery so much as make it livable.
The rainbow is an inspired test case because it’s both scientific and mythic. We can explain refraction, sure, but the lived experience of a rainbow is stubbornly emotional: sudden, public, and oddly private. By claiming poetry tells “how rainbows are made,” Sandburg nods to poetry’s appetite for origins, for turning raw perception into a story you can carry. Then he tightens the screw with “and why they go away.” That “why” isn’t physics; it’s grief, impermanence, the ache of beauty that doesn’t sign a lease.
Context matters: Sandburg wrote in a distinctly American, early-20th-century key, suspicious of elite ornament but devoted to plainspoken wonder. He’s not defending poetry as a luxury. He’s pitching it as our best language for transient phenomena - love, labor, hope, nationhood - the bright arcs we recognize only as they’re already fading. Poetry becomes the ghostwriter of experience, handing us explanations that don’t solve the mystery so much as make it livable.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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