Mr. Attila

By Carl Sandburg 1878–1967 Carl Sandburg

They made a myth of you, professor,

you of the gentle voice,

the books, the specs,

the furitive rabbit manners

in the mortar-board cap

and the medieval gown.

They didn’t think it, eh professor?

On account of you’re so absent-minded,

you bumping into the tree and saying,

“Excuse me, I thought you were a tree,”

passing on again black and absent-minded.

Now it’s “Mr. Attila, how do you do?”

Do you pack wallops of wholesale death?

Are you the practical dynamic son-of-a-gun?

Have you come through with a few abstractions?

Is it you Mr. Attila we hear saying,

“I beg your pardon but we believe we have made some degree of progress on the residual qualities of the atom”?

[August, 1945]

Source: The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1970)

Biography

"Trying to write briefly about Carl Sandburg," said a friend of the poet, "is like trying to picture the Grand Canyon in one black and white snapshot." His range of interests was enumerated by his close friend, Harry Golden, who, in his study of the poet, called Sandburg "the one American writer who distinguished himself in five fields—poetry, history, biography, fiction, and music."

Sandburg composed his poetry primarily in . . .

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