With the publication of Chicago Poems in 1916, Carl Sandburg
became one of the most famous poets in America: the voice of
a midwestern literary revolt, fusing free-verse poetics with
hard-edged journalistic observation and energetic, sometimes
raucous protest. By the time his first book appeared,
Sandburg had been many things--a farm hand, a soldier in the
Spanish-American War, an active Socialist, a newspaper
reporter and movie reviewer-and he was determined to write
poetry that would explode the genteel conventions of
contemporary verse. His poems are populated by factory
workers, washerwomen, crooked politicians, hobos, vaudeville
dancers, and battle-scarred radicals. Writing from the
bottom up, bringing to his poetry the immediacy of America's
streets and prairies, factories and jails, Sandburg forged a
distinctive style at once lyrical and vernacular, by turns
angry, gritty, funny, and tender. Paul Berman takes a fresh
look at Sandburg's work and what it can tell us about
20th-century America in a volume that draws on such volumes
as Cornhuskers, Smoke and Steel, and Slabs of the Sunburnt
West.
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