"There was always the consolation that if I didn't like what I wrote I could throw it away or burn it"
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Sandburg’s line turns the romantic myth of inspiration into something closer to housekeeping: write, then decide whether it deserves to live. The “consolation” isn’t applause or posterity; it’s control. For a poet who spent years as a journalist, folk-song collector, and plainspoken chronicler of American labor and city life, that’s telling. He’s not posturing as a sacred vessel for language. He’s describing writing as work with an exit hatch.
The phrase “throw it away or burn it” carries two kinds of relief. One is practical: drafts are disposable, which makes the act of drafting less precious and therefore less paralyzing. The other is darker and more intimate: burning suggests secrecy, shame, or at least the desire to keep certain versions of the self from becoming public property. Sandburg wrote in an era when print made you permanent in a new way, when a poem could get pinned to you like a label: populist, sentimental, unpolished, “Midwestern.” The ability to destroy a text is the ability to refuse that labeling.
It also hints at a democratic ethic beneath his famously accessible voice. If the poem doesn’t meet his own standard, it doesn’t get to take up space in the world. That’s humility with a backbone. The subtext is a quiet permission slip to fail privately so you can succeed publicly: revision as freedom, not punishment. In a culture that treats creation as instant content, Sandburg’s comfort is almost radical: the right to delete.
The phrase “throw it away or burn it” carries two kinds of relief. One is practical: drafts are disposable, which makes the act of drafting less precious and therefore less paralyzing. The other is darker and more intimate: burning suggests secrecy, shame, or at least the desire to keep certain versions of the self from becoming public property. Sandburg wrote in an era when print made you permanent in a new way, when a poem could get pinned to you like a label: populist, sentimental, unpolished, “Midwestern.” The ability to destroy a text is the ability to refuse that labeling.
It also hints at a democratic ethic beneath his famously accessible voice. If the poem doesn’t meet his own standard, it doesn’t get to take up space in the world. That’s humility with a backbone. The subtext is a quiet permission slip to fail privately so you can succeed publicly: revision as freedom, not punishment. In a culture that treats creation as instant content, Sandburg’s comfort is almost radical: the right to delete.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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