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The Bells by Edgar Allan Poe (read by Tom O'Bedlam)

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There is a wolf in me ... fangs pointed for tearing gashes ... a red tongue for raw meat ... and the hot lapping of blood-I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me and the wilderness will not let it go.

There is a fox in me ... a silver-gray fox ... I sniff and guess ... I pick things out of the wind and air ... I nose in the dark night and take sleepers and eat them and hide the feathers ... I circle and loop and double-cross.

There is a hog in me ... a snout and a belly ... a machinery for eating and grunting ... a machinery for sleeping satisfied in the sun-I got this too from the wilderness and the wilderness will not let it go.

There is a fish in me ... I know I came from saltblue water-gates ... I scurried with shoals of herring ... I blew waterspouts with porpoises ... before land was ... before the water went down ... before Noah ... before the first chapter of Genesis.

There is a baboon in me ... clambering-clawed ... dog-faced ... yawping a galoot's hunger ... hairy under the armpits ... here are the hawk-eyed hankering men ... here are the blond and blue-eyed women ... here they hide curled asleep waiting ... ready to snarl and kill ... ready to sing and give milk ... waiting-I keep the baboon because the wilderness says so.

There is an eagle in me and a mockingbird ... and the eagle flies among the Rocky Mountains of my dreams and fights among the Sierra crags of what I want ... and the mockingbird warbles in the early forenoon before the dew is gone, warbles in the underbrush of my Chattanoogas of hope, gushes over the blue Ozark foothills of my wishes-And I got the eagle and the mockingbird from the wilderness.

O, I got a zoo, I got a menagerie, inside my ribs, under my bony head, under my red-valve heart-and I got something else: it is a man-child heart, a woman-child heart: it is a father and mother and lover: it came from God-Knows-Where: it is going to God-Knows-Where-For I am the keeper of the zoo: I say yes and no: I sing and kill and work: I am a pal of the world: I came from the wilderness.

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There is a wolf in me ... fangs pointed for tearing gashes ... a red tongue for raw meat ... and the hot lapping of blood-I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me and the wilderness will not let it go. There is a fox in me ...

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Gwendolyn Brooks is one of the most highly regarded, influential, and widely read poets of 20th-century American poetry. She was a much-honored poet, even in her lifetime, with the distinction of being the first Black author to win the Pulitzer Prize. She also was poetry consultant to the Library of Congress-the first Black woman to hold that position-and poet laureate of the State of Illinois. Many of Brooks's works display a political consciousness, especially those from the 1960s and later, with several of her poems reflecting the civil rights activism of that period. Her body of work gave her, according to critic George E. Kent, "a unique position in American letters. Not only has she combined a strong commitment to racial identity and equality with a mastery of poetic techniques, but she has also managed to bridge the gap between the academic poets of her generation in the 1940s and the young Black militant writers of the 1960s."

Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, but her family moved to Chicago when she was young. Her father was a janitor who had hoped to become a doctor; her mother was a schoolteacher and classically trained pianist. They were supportive of their daughter's passion for reading and writing. Brooks was 13 when her first published poem, "Eventide," appeared in American Childhood; by the time she was 17 she was publishing poems frequently in the Chicago Defender, a newspaper serving Chicago's African American population. After attending junior college and working for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, she developed her craft in poetry workshops and began writing the poems, focusing on urban Black experience, that comprised her first collection, A Street in Bronzeville (1945).

Her poems in A Street in Bronzeville and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Annie Allen (1949) were "devoted to small, carefully cerebrated, terse portraits of the Black urban poor," commented Richard K. Barksdale in Modern Black Poets: A Collection of Critical Essays. Brooks once described her style as "folksy narrative," but she varied her forms, using free verse, sonnets, and other models. Several critics welcomed Brooks as a new voice in poetry; fellow poet Rolfe Humphries wrote in the New York Times Book Review that "we have, in A Street in Bronzeville, a good book and a real poet," while Saturday Review of Literature contributor Starr Nelson called that volume "a work of art and a poignant social document." In Annie Allen, which follows the experiences of a Black girl as she grows into adulthood, Brooks married social issues, especially around gender, with experimentation: one section of the book is an epic poem, "The Anniad"-a play on The Aeneid. Langston Hughes, in a review of Annie Allen for Voices, remarked that "the people and poems in Gwendolyn Brooks' book are alive, reaching, and very much of today."

In the 1950s Brooks published her first and only novel, Maud Martha (1953), which details its title character's life in short vignettes. Maud suffers prejudice not only from white people but also from lighter-skinned African Americans, something that mirrored Brooks's experience. Eventually, Maud takes a stand for her own dignity by turning her back on a patronizing, racist store clerk. One way of looking at the book, then," commented Harry B. Shaw "is as a war with... people's concepts of beauty." In a Black World review, Annette Oliver Shands noted the way in which "Brooks does not specify traits, niceties or assets for members of the Black community to acquire in order to attain their just rights... So, this is not a novel to inspire social advancement on the part of fellow Blacks. Nor does it say be poor, Black and happy. The message is to accept the challenge of being human and to assert humanness with urgency."

Brooks's later work took on politics more overtly, displaying what National Observer contributor Bruce Cook termed "an intense awareness of the problems of color and justice." Toni Cade Bambara reported in the New York Times Book Review that at the age of 50 "something happened to Brooks, a something most certainly in evidence in In the Mecca (1968) and subsequent works-a new movement and energy, intensity, richness, power of statement and a new stripped lean, compressed style. A change of style prompted by a change of mind." This shift or change is often depicted as the result of Brooks's attendance at a gathering of Black writers at Fisk University in 1967; however, recent scholars such as Evie Shockley and Cheryl Clark challenge the idea that Brooks's career can be so neatly divided. Clark, for example, has described In the Mecca as Brooks's "final seminar on the Western lyric." Brooks herself noted that the poets at Fisk were committed to writing as Blacks, about Blacks, and for a Black audience. If many of her earlier poems had fulfilled this aim, it was not due to conscious intent, she said; but from this time forward, Brooks thought of herself as an African determined not to compromise social comment for the sake of technical proficiency.

Although In the Mecca and Brooks's subsequent works have been characterized as possessing what a Virginia Quarterly Review critic called "raw power and roughness," several commentators emphasized that these poems are neither bitter nor vengeful. Instead, according to Cook, they are more "about bitterness" than bitter in themselves. Essayist Charles Israel suggested that In the Mecca's title poem, for example, shows "a deepening of Brooks's concern with social problems." A mother has lost a small daughter in the block-long ghetto tenement, the Mecca; the long poem traces her steps through the building, revealing her neighbors to be indifferent or insulated by their own personal obsessions. The mother finds her little girl, who "never learned that black is not beloved," who "was royalty when poised, / sly, at the A and P's fly-open door," under a Jamaican resident's cot, murdered. R. Baxter Miller, writing in Black American Poets between Worlds, 1940-1960, observed, " In the Mecca is a most complex and intriguing book; it seeks to balance the sordid realities of urban life with an imaginative process of reconciliation and redemption." Other poems in the book, occasioned by the death of Malcolm X or the dedication of a mural of Black heroes painted on a Chicago slum building, express Brooks's commitment to her community's awareness of themselves as a political as well as a cultural entity.

Brooks's activism and her interest in nurturing Black literature led her to leave major publisher Harper & Row in favor of fledgling Black publishing companies. In the 1970s, she chose Dudley Randall's Broadside Press to publish her poetry collections Riot (1969), Family Pictures (1970), Aloneness (1971), Aurora (1972), and Beckonings (1975) and Report from Part One (1972), the first volume of her autobiography. She edited two collections of poetry- A Broadside Treasury (1971) and Jump Bad: A New Chicago Anthology (1971)-for the Detroit-area press. The Chicago-based Third World Press, run by Haki R. Madhubuti-formerly Don L. Lee, one of the young poets she had met during the 1960s-also brought many Brooks titles into print. Brooks was the first writer to read in Broadside's original Poet's Theatre series and was also the first poet to read in the second opening of the series when the press was revived under new ownership in 1988. Brooks, however, felt that Riot, Family Pictures, Beckonings, and other books brought out by Black publishers were given only brief notice by critics of the literary establishment because they "did not wish to encourage Black publishers."

Later Brooks poems continue to deal with political subjects and figures, such as South African activist Winnie Mandela, the onetime wife of antiapartheid leader-and later president of the country-Nelson Mandela. Brooks once told interviewer George Stavros: "I want to write poems that will be non-compromising. I don't want to stop a concern with words doing good jobs, which has always been a concern of mine, but I want to write poems that will be meaningful... things that will touch them." Brooks's work was objective about human nature, several reviewers observed. Janet Overmeyer noted in the Christian Science Monitor that Brooks's "particular, outstanding, genius is her unsentimental regard and respect for all human beings... She neither foolishly pities nor condemns-she creates." Overmeyer continued, "From her poet's craft bursts a whole gallery of wholly alive persons, preening, squabbling, loving, weeping; many a novelist cannot do so well in ten times the space." Littlejohn maintained that Brooks achieves this effect through a high "degree of artistic control," further relating, "The words, lines, and arrangements have been worked and worked and worked again into poised exactness: the unexpected apt metaphor, the mock-colloquial asides amid jewelled phrases, the half-ironic repetitions-she knows it all." More important, Brooks's objective treatment of issues such as poverty and racism "produces genuine emotional tension," the critic wrote.

Among Brooks's major prose works are her two volumes of autobiography. When Report from Part One was published, some reviewers expressed disappointment that it did not provide the level of personal detail or the insight into Black literature that they had expected. "They wanted a list of domestic spats," remarked Brooks. Bambara noted that it "is not a sustained dramatic narrative for the nosey, being neither the confessions of a private woman poet or the usual sort of mahogany-desk memoir public personages inflict upon the populace at the first sign of a cardiac... It documents the growth of Gwen Brooks." Other critics praised the book for explaining the poet's new orientation toward her racial heritage and her role as a poet. In a passage she presented again in later books as a definitive statement, Brooks wrote: "I-who have 'gone the gamut' from an almost angry rejection of my dark skin by some of my brainwashed brothers and sisters to a surprised queenhood in the new Black sun-am qualified to enter at least the kindergarten of new consciousness now. New consciousness and trudge-toward-progress. I have hopes for myself... I know now that I am essentially an essential African, in occupancy here because of an indeed 'peculiar' institution... I know that Black fellow-feeling must be the Black man's encyclopedic Primer. I know that the Black-and-white integration concept, which in the mind of some beaming early saint was a dainty spinning dream, has wound down to farce... I know that the Black emphasis must be not against white but FOR Black... In the Conference-That-Counts, whose date may be 1980 or 2080 (woe betide the Fabric of Man if it is 2080), there will be no looking up nor looking down." In the future, she envisioned "the profound and frequent shaking of hands, which in Africa is so important. The shaking of hands in warmth and strength and union."

Brooks put some of the finishing touches on the second volume of her autobiography while serving as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. Brooks was 68 when she became the first Black woman to be appointed to the post. Of her many duties there, the most important, in her view, were visits to local schools. Similar visits to colleges, universities, prisons, hospitals, and drug rehabilitation centers characterized her tenure as poet laureate of Illinois. In that role, she sponsored and hosted annual literary awards ceremonies at which she presented prizes funded "out of her own pocket, which, despite her modest means, is of legendary depth," Reginald Gibbons related in Chicago Tribune Books. She honored and encouraged many poets in her state through the Illinois Poets Laureate Awards and Significant Illinois Poets Awards programs.

Proving the breadth of Brooks's appeal, poets representing a wide variety of "races and... poetic camps" gathered at the University of Chicago to celebrate the poet's 70th birthday in 1987, Gibbons reported. Brooks brought them together, he said, "in... a moment of good will and cheer." In recognition of her service and achievements, a junior high school in Harvey, Illinois, was named for her, and she was similarly honored by Western Illinois University's Gwendolyn Brooks Center for African-American Literature. In 2017 celebrations of the centenary of Brooks's birth were held at the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, where Gwendolyn Brooks's papers are held.

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Gwendolyn Brooks is one of the most highly regarded, influential, and widely read poets of 20th-century American poetry. She was a much-honored poet, even in her lifetime, with the distinction of being the first Black author to win the Pulitzer Prize. She also was poetry consultant to the Library...

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Poet Carl Sandburg was born into a poor family in Galesburg, Illinois. In his youth, he worked many odd jobs before serving in the 6th Illinois Infantry in Puerto Rico during the Spanish-American War. He studied at Lombard College, and then moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he worked as an organizer for the Socialist Democratic Party. In 1913, he moved to Chicago, Illinois and wrote for the Chicago Daily News. His first poems were published by Harriet Monroe in Poetry magazine. Sandburg's collection Chicago Poems (1916) was highly regarded, and he received the Pulitzer Prize for Corn Huskers (1918). His many subsequent books of poetry include The People, Yes (1936), Good Morning, America (1928), Slabs of the Sunburnt West (1922), and Smoke and Steel (1920).

"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 free verse. Concerning rhyme versus non-rhyme Sandburg once said airily, "If it jells into free verse, all right. If it jells into rhyme, all right." Some critics noted that the illusion of poetry in his works was based more on the arrangement of the lines than on the lines themselves. Sandburg, aware of the criticism, wrote in the preface to Complete Poems (1950), "There is a formal poetry only in form, all dressed up and nowhere to go. The number of syllables, the designated and required stresses of accent, the rhymes if wanted-they all come off with the skill of a solved crossword puzzle. ... The fact is ironic. A proficient and sometimes exquisite performer in rhymed verse goes out of his way to register the point that the more rhyme there is in poetry the more danger of its tricking the writer into something other than the urge in the beginning." He dismissed modern poetry, however, as "a series of ear wigglings." In Good Morning, America (1928), he published 38 definitions of poetry, among them: "Poetry is a pack-sack of invisible keepsakes. Poetry is a sky dark with a wild-duck migration. Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during a moment." His success as a poet was limited to that of a follower of Walt Whitman and of the Imagists. In Carl Sandburg, Karl Detzer says that in 1918 "admirers proclaimed him a latter-day Walt Whitman; objectors cried that their six-year-old daughters could write better poetry."

Admirers of his poetry, however, have included Sherwood Anderson ("among all the poets of America he is my poet"), and Amy Lowell, who called Chicago Poems (1916) "one of the most original books this age has produced." Lowell's observations were reiterated by H.L. Mencken, who called Sandburg "a true original, his own man." No one, it is agreed, can deny the unique quality of his style. In his newspaper days, an old friend recalls, the slogan was, "Print Sandburg as is." It was Sandburg, as Golden observes, who "put America on paper," writing the American idiom, speaking to the masses, who held no terror for him. As Richard Crowder notes in Carl Sandburg, the poet "Had been the first poet of modern times actually to use the language of the people as his almost total means of expression. ... Sandburg had entered into the language of the people; he was not looking at it as a scientific phenomenon or a curiosity. ... He was at home with it." Sandburg's own Whitmanesque comment was, "I am the people-the mob-the crowd-the mass. Did you know that all the work of the world is done through me?" He was always read by the masses, as well as by scholars. He once observed, "I'll probably die propped up in bed trying to write a poem about America."

Sandburg's account of the life of Abraham Lincoln is one of the monumental works of the century. Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (1939) alone exceeds in length the collected writings of Shakespeare by some 150,000 words. Though Sandburg did deny the story that in preparation he read everything ever published on Lincoln, he did collect and classify Lincoln material for 30 years, moving himself into a garret, storing his extra material in a barn, and for nearly 15 years writing on a cracker-box typewriter. His intent was to separate Lincoln the man from Lincoln the myth, to avoid hero-worship, to relate with graphic detail and humanness the man both he and Whitman so admired. The historian Charles A. Beard called the finished product "a noble monument of American literature," written with "indefatigable thoroughness." Allan Nevins saw it as "homely but beautiful, learned but simple, exhaustively detailed but panoramic ... [occupying] a niche all its own, unlike any other biography or history in the language." The Pulitzer Prize committee apparently agreed. Prohibited from awarding the biography prize for any work on Washington or Lincoln, it circumvented the rules by placing the book in the category of history. As a result of this work, Sandburg was the first private citizen to deliver an address before a joint session of Congress (on February 12, 1959, the 150th anniversary of Lincoln's birth).

Perhaps Sandburg was best known to America as the singing bard-the "voice of America singing," says Golden. Sandburg was an author accepted as a personality, as was Mark Twain. Requests for his lectures began to appear as early as 1908. He was his own accompanist, and was not merely a musician of sorts; he played the guitar well enough to have been a pupil of Andres Segovia. Sandburg's songs were projected by a voice "in which you [could] hear farm hands wailing and levee Negroes moaning." It was fortunate that he was willing to travel about reciting and recording his poetry, for the interpretation his voice lent to his work was unforgettable. With its deep rich cadences, dramatic pauses, and Midwestern dialect, his speech was "a kind of singing." Ben Hecht once wrote: "Whether he chatted at lunch or recited from the podium he had always the same voice. He spoke like a man slowly revealing something."

Sandburg was the recipient of numerous honorary degrees, had six high schools and five elementary schools named for him, and held news conferences with presidents at the White House. "My father couldn't sign his name," wrote Sandburg; "[he] made his 'mark' on the CB&Q payroll sheet. My mother was able to read the Scriptures in her native language, but she could not write, and I wrote of Abraham Lincoln whose own mother could not read or write! I guess that somewhere along in this you'll find a story of America."

A Sandburg archives is maintained in the Sandburg Room at the University of Illinois. Ralph G. Newman, who is known primarily as a Lincoln scholar but who also is the possessor of what is perhaps the largest and most important collection of Sandburgiana, has said that a complete bibliography of Sandburg's works, including contributions to periodicals and anthologies, forewords, introductions, and foreign editions would number more than 400 pages. Sandburg received 200 to 400 letters each week. Though, to a friend who asked how he managed to look 10 years younger than he appeared on his last visit, he replied, "From NOT answering my correspondence," he reportedly filed his mail under "F" (friendly and fan letters), "No reply needed," and "Hi fi" (to be read and answered).

For all this fame, he remained unassuming. What he wanted from life was "to be out of jail, ... to eat regular, ... to get what I write printed, ... a little love at home and a little nice affection hither and yon over the American landscape, ... [and] to sing every day." He wrote with a pencil, a fountain pen, or a typewriter, "but I draw the line at dictating 'em," he said. He kept his home as it was, refusing, for example, to rearrange his vast library in some orderly fashion; he knew where everything was. Furthermore, he said, "I want Emerson in every room."

On September 17, 1967, there was a National Memorial Service at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, at which Archibald MacLeish and Mark Van Doren read from Sandburg's poetry. A Carl Sandburg Exhibition of memorabilia was held at the Hallmark Gallery in New York City, from January to February, 1968, and his home is under consideration as a National Historical site.

Sandburg's prose and poetry continues to inspire publication in new formats. The volume Arithmetic (1993), for example, presents Sandburg's famous poem of the same title in the form of a uniquely illustrated text for children. Sandburg's poem is a humorous commentary on the grade-school experience of learning arithmetic: "Arithmetic is where numbers fly like pigeons in and out of your head." Reviewers praised the creative presentation of the poem, and the effectiveness of what School Library Journal reviewer JoAnn Rees called Ted Rand's "brightly colored, mixed-media anamorphic paintings." Also written for children, several of Sandburg's unpublished "Rootabaga" stories (also referred to as "American fairy tales") have been posthumously collected by Sandburg scholar George Hendrick in More Rootabagas (1993). Sandburg had published Rootabaga Pigeons in 1923 and Potato Face in 1930, leaving many other tales in the series unpublished. Critics praised the inventiveness, whimsicality, and humor of the stories, which feature such characters and places as "The Potato Face Blind Man," "Ax Me No Questions," and "The Village of Liver and Onions." "Sandburg was writing for the children in himself," comments Verlyn Klinkenborg in New York Times Book Review, "for the eternal child, who, when he or she hears language spoken, hears rhythm, not sense."

In 2002, a collection of Sandburg's previously unknown letters, manuscripts, and photographs was auctioned for $80,000 by Tom Hall Auctions in Schneckville, Pennsylvania. The papers belonged to Sandburg's editor until her death, when they were given to her nephew. Many items were obtained by the University of Illinois, where Sandburg's papers are held.

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Poet Carl Sandburg was born into a poor family in Galesburg, Illinois. In his youth, he worked many odd jobs before serving in the 6th Illinois Infantry in Puerto Rico during the Spanish-American War. He studied at Lombard College, and then moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he worked as an...