“THE MAN IN THE STREET IS FED”
By:
April 30, 2025
A (pro- or anti-) science-, mathematics-, technology-, space-, apocalypse-, dehumanization-, disenchantment-, and/or future-oriented poem published during sf’s emergent Radium Age (c. 1900–1935). Research and selection by Joshua Glenn.
Here and there a man in the street
is young, hard as nails,
cold with questions he asks
from his burning insides.
Bred in a motorized world of trial and error
He measures by millionths of an inch,
Knows ball bearings from spiral gearings,
Chain transmission, heat treatment of steel,
Speeds and feeds of automatic screw machines,
Having handled electric tools
With pistol grip and trigger switch.
Yet he can’t connect and he can name thousands
Like himself idle amid plants also idle.
He studies the matter of what is justice
And revises himself on money, comfort, good name.
He doesn’t know what he wants
And says when he gets it he’ll know it.
— excerpt from an untitled poem (its first lines are “The man in the street is fed / with lies in peace, gas in war”) that appears as the 99th (of 107) section of Sandburg’s 1936 Whitman-esque, book-length poem The People, Yes. Written over an eight-year period, this is Sandburg’s last major book of poetry.
Sandburg believed that economic inequity lay at the root of all social injustice, from labor conflict to racial and civil strife.
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF POETRY: Stephen Spender’s THE PYLONS | George Sterling’s THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS | Archibald MacLeish’s EINSTEIN | Thomas Thornely’s THE ATOM | C.S. Lewis’s DYMER | Stephen Vincent Benét’s METROPOLITAN NIGHTMARE | Robert Frost’s FIRE AND ICE | Aldous Huxley’s FIFTH PHILOSOPHER’S SONG | Sara Teasdale’s “THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS” | Edith Södergran’s ON FOOT I HAD TO… | Robert Graves’s WELSH INCIDENT | Nancy Cunard’s ZEPPELINS | D.H. Lawrence’s WELLSIAN FUTURES | & many more.