The People, Yes was published by Harcourt, Brace in 1936, during the Great Depression. It is Sandburg’s longest and most ambitious poetic work — over 300 pages of what might be called a democratic epic: not a narrative poem but a collage of American voices, proverbs, folk sayings, tall tales, jokes, political speeches, union songs, and original verse, all organized around the thesis that democratic civilization will survive any catastrophe because the people endure.
The poem draws on Sandburg’s decades of collecting folk material (he was simultaneously working on The American Songbag) and on his journalism covering labor movements, political campaigns, and ordinary Americans. Sections are built from stacked proverbs (“The people will live on. / The learning and blundering people will live on.”), from dialogues overheard on trains and in union halls, from tall tales about Paul Bunyan and Johnny Appleseed, and from original verse that ranges from lyric intensity to plain-speech directness.
The work divided critics: some saw it as Sandburg’s masterpiece — a genuinely democratic American epic that fulfilled Whitman’s promise. Others (particularly the New Critics, who valued density and ambiguity) dismissed it as sentimental populism dressed in free verse.
Collecting The People, Yes
First edition (Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1936): Boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine in jacket: $80–$200
- Signed: $200–$500