Billy Sunday and Other Poems.

• Author: Mitgang, Herbert

By Carl Sandburg edited by George Hendrick and Willene Hendrick Harcourt, Brace. 144 pp. $19.95, cloth; $9.95, paper.

After three-quarters of a century, Carl Sandburg's most controversial poem--a diatribe in free verse against Billy Sunday, the Elmer Gantry-like evangelist who preached fire and brimstone and was a forerunner of today's televangelists--has been published in unexpurgated form for the first time.

In the standard edition of Sandburg's Complete Poems, the poem is blindly called, "To a Contemporary Bunkshooter," a title he reluctantly consented to use in 1916 upon the advice of Alfred Harcourt, his publisher. The name of the preacher, who died in 1935, never appeared in the title or body of the poem as it has generally been known all these years. But now it carries Sandburg's title, "Billy Sunday," finally identifying the evangelist by name in the twenty-one-stanza poem.

This outspoken poem leads off Billy Sunday and Other Poems, edited by George Hendrick, professor of English at the University of Illinois, and Willene Hendrick, a literary historian. The poems are derived from the voluminous Sandburg papers that are housed in the library at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.

The book reveals Sandburg's ideas and beliefs in a different and stronger light. This isn't simply the Sandburg of his haiku "Fog," or writing about Chicago as the city of the big shoulders.

In addition to "Billy Sunday," forty-three more unpublished, uncollected, or unexpurgated poems in the collection enhance the image of Sandburg as a passionate man of letters and crusader for people and causes--social justice, progress for workers. racial equality. Most of these poems are closer to the early Sandburg, the one-time Socialist Party organizer, who enjoyed telling old friends, "I planted a lot of soapboxes in Wisconsin."

In the unexpurgated "Billy Sunday," Sandburg writes: "You, Billy Sunday, put a smut on every human blossom that/ comes in reach of your rotten breath belching about hell-fire/ and hiccuping about this man who lived a clean life in Galilee." And he goes on, "I won't take my religion from a man who never works except/ with his mouth and never cherishes a memory except the/ face of the woman on the American silver dollar."

"Billy Sunday" originally appeared in the September 1915 issues of The Masses and the International Socialist Review, two radical magazines. But Alfred Harcourt, who was then at Henry Holt, considered the poem too...