This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
If you don't agree that central Illinois' prairies and rivers form a living Eden, perhaps you are looking from the wrong viewpoint, a problem illustrated by the State's three great poets: Vachel Linday, Edgar Lee Masters, and Carl Sandburg.
For Vachel Lindsay, author of "The Congo," and "General William Booth Enters into Heaven," an Illinois Eden was a future promise—a place we would arrive at someday when all of us were converts to his Gospel of Beauty. Lindsay tramped around the state preaching his vision of the future. Small Illinois towns would Bethlehems, he wrote, and bring forth future saviors.
For Edgar Lee Master, author of Spoon River Anthology, it was already too late. New Salem, where Lincoln once lived, was a Bethlehem, but is now merely a shrine to a lost vision. Illinois was not Eden, but Paradise Lost, its citizens having degenerated into small mean spirited, soulless men and women, gossiping about each other from their narrow graves.
Only for Carl Sandburg, looking out across the prairies from his home in Galesburg, was Illinois an Eden here and now, its farmers and housewives Adams and Eves. For Sandburg, Eden was not a resort, but a place of hard work and strong emotions. A place that can even be called Chicago, where even amid the freight trains and tool makers, the fog can come on little cat feet.
"Poetry," Sandburg once wrote, "is a synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits." And the Illinois prairies were, for Sandburg, that same combination of the real and the ideal, flesh and spirit. "Have you seen a red sunset drip over one of my cornfields," he wrote, "the shore of night stars, the wave of lines of dawn up a wheat valley? / Have you heard my threshing crews yelling amid the chaff of a strawpile and the running wheat of the wagonboards, my cornhuskers, my harvest hands hauling crops."
Do you understand why I prefer Sandburg to the other two? Vachel Lindsay and Edgar Lee Masters looked too hard and too far away for that prairie Eden Carl Sandburg found right near home, at the edge of Galesburg.
Rock Island Lines is underwritten by the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and Augustana College, Rock Island.
