Billy Sunday and Other Poems.

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In addition to "Billy Sunday," forty-three more unpublished, uncollected, or unexpurgated poems in the collection enhance the image of Sandburg as a passionate man of letters and crusader for people and causes--social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 raw for inclusion in Chicago Poems in 1916.

Sandburg removed Billy Sunday's name and toned down the language. He told the publisher that his revisions ought to make the poem acceptable "to all but the most hidebound and creed-drilled religionists." Harcourt agreed, and it remained in Chicago Poems, revised.

The collection also includes several of Sandburg's antiwar poems. One of them, "Planked Whitefish," refers to genital mutilation and the deadly consequences of battle in wartorn France. "Ashes and Dreams" made it into the International Socialist Review but not into any Sandburg collection until now; the poem speaks of mothers of the world," watching as "the trenches call." In "Vaudeville 1916," Sandburg sharply contrasts scenes of Chicago vaudeville with those of the terrible battles in Europe, the clown's mock danger against the horrors of Verdun.

Sandburg was proud of his own service in the Spanish-American War before the turn of the century, but at first he was opposed to American entry into World War I. Once it became clear that the United States was going Over There, he supported President Woodrow Wilson, breaking ranks with many of his old socialist comrades and pacifists. His changing views, Professor Hendrick says, may have influenced his decision not to publish these antiwar poems.

A poem called "The Eastland" includes strong images of the sufferings of workingmen in industrial Chicago. A steamship, the Eastland, loaded with 2,500 workers and their families on a company picnic, sank on the Chicago River in 1915, causing more than 800 people to drown.

Sandburg blamed the overloaded "ancient tub" on the needs of "business." He wrote that "grim industrial feudalism stands with dripping and red hands behind the whole Eastland affair." The poem was considered too radical to be published anywhere.

One of the book's previously unpublished white-heat poems, "Legal Midnight Hour," was written the day after the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti were executed for murder in 1927 by the state of Massachusetts. The case had become an international cause celebre because many people thought the Italian immigrants were convicted more for their political beliefs than for a crime. In later years, it was discovered that those who signed on to defend justice for the accused anarchists inevitably got their names into J. Edgar Hoover's secret dossiers.

In the final lines of his poetic tribute to the anarchists, Sandburg questioned whether the victims were dead and correctly predicted that the case would live on symbolically. His poetic views coincided with his personal philosophy. Sandburg once said that whenever there was a hanging, he was on the side of the man on the wrong end of the rope. In "The People, Yes." which can be regarded as the poem closest to his heart and mind, he wrote, "There are men who can't be bought."

Hendrick believes that Sandburg's poetry is generally overlooked in modern anthologies of American literature that are studied on campus. He hopes that Billy Sunday and Other Poems will bring Sandburg greater recognition as a craftsman and contemporary historian in verse.

"One reason for the neglect is that Sandburg doesn't need the critics and anthologists to interpret his work," Hendrick says. "Like his idol, Walt Whitman, Sandburg wanted to be understood by common people, so he doesn't fit into any cult of obscurity. What he writes is perfectly clear. He doesn't need a deconstructionist. If he did, he'd probably be more popular today."