Rebels With a Cause looks to the future while admiring the past. In the last 100 years there have been many rebellious American writers who have pointed the way forward. And we draw on all of them for inspiration. One poet who has fallen out of favor is Carl Sandburg. Perhaps he is too rough, too simplistic. His writing speaks to an industrial America that no longer exists and is rarely mythologized. The broad-shoulder brother of Chicago speaks to a Midwestern independence that seems suspiciously patriarch, insolent, and naive. Yet in the midst of Sandburg's bravado of muscular arms and steel, there are messages that carry on today.
In his poem "Prairie" he begins by speaking of a land of wheat and milk, but ends with the future.
I speak of new cities and new people.
I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.
I tell you yesterday is a wind gone down,
a sun dropped in the west.
I tell you there is nothing in the world
only an ocean of to-morrows,
a sky of to-morrows.
I am a brother of cornhuskers who say at sundown:
To-morrow is a day.
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