His poetry, so wonderful when it is really flying, isn’t trying to tell you how much he knows. It’s giving thanks for how much there is to be known.
Sandburg is unreadable today only because of the way he wrote. His prose was bad poetry, like his poetry.
The question of originality, if it arises at all, can never be peripheral: originality is more than a requirement in good poetry, it is a description of it. As Of This Writing (2003)