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Carl Sandburg: Selected Poems

Edited by Paul Berman

“His genius, his inspiration in this poem and some others, was to look around the streets, at the billboards and the advertising slogans, and see in those things a language. And he was able to figure out that this language itself contained poetry.”—Paul Berman, in an interview with NPR

Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

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, 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.

Paul Berman is a writer in residence at New York University and the author of several books, including The Flight of the Intellectuals.. His essays on poets and poetry have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Parnassus, and elsewhere.

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Table of Contents

Introduction by Paul Berman

from Chicago Poems (1916)
Chicago
Masses
Lost
The Harbor
They Will Say
Mill-Doors
A Teamster’s Farewell
Fish Crier
Picnic Boat
Muckers
Blacklisted
Mag
Anna Imroth
Mamie
Personality
Cumulatives
To Certain Journeymen
Limited
A Coin
Dynamiter
Ice Handler
Jack
Under a Hat Rim
In a Breath
Bronzes
Ready to Kill
Skyscraper
Fog
Crimson
Flux
Kin
White Shoulders
Iron
Statistics
And They Obey
Jaws
Wars
A Sphinx
To a Dead Man
Under the Harvest Moon
Back Yard
On the Breakwater
I Sang
Window
Pals
Child Moon
Trafficker
Harrison Street Court
Jungheimer’s
Gone
All Day Long
Old Woman
’Boes
I Am the People, the Mob
Languages
The Junk Man
Silver Nails

from Cornhuskers (1918)
Prairie
Hits and Runs
Village in Late Summer
Sunset from Omaha Hotel Window
Still Life
Band Concert
Localities
Manitoba Childe Roland
Bilbea
Southern Pacific
Washerwoman
Portrait of a Motor Car
Buffalo Bill
Prayers of Steel
Interior
Psalm of Those Who Go Forth Before Daylight
Near Keokuk
Lawyer
Three Balls
Humdrum
Knucks
Upstairs
Bricklayer Love
Cool Tombs
Old Osawatomie
Grass
Gargoyle
House
Out of White Lips
Smoke

from Smoke and Steel (1920)
Smoke and Steel
Five Towns on the B. and O.
Work Gangs
Hats
They All Want to Play Hamlet
Manual System
Stripes
Crapshooters
Cahoots
The Hangman at Home
Death Snips Proud Men
“Old-Fashioned Requited Love”
Osawatomie
The Lawyers Know Too Much
Threes
A.E.F.
Bas-Relief
And This Will Be All?
Sea-Wash
Sleepyheads
Far Rockaway Night Till Morning
Trinity Peace
Jack London and O. Henry
Two Strangers Breakfast
An Electric Sign Goes Dark
They Buy with an Eye to Looks
White Ash
Vaudeville Dancer
Potomac Town in February
Buffalo Dusk
New Farm Tractor
The Skyscraper Loves Night
Wistful

from Slabs of the Sunburnt West (1922)
The Windy City
At the Gates of Tombs
Hazardous Occupations
Props
Ambassadors of Grief

from Good Morning, America (1928)
from Good Morning, America
Small Homes
Milk-White Moon, Put the Cows to Sleep
Slow Program
Three Slants at New York
Phizzog
Two Nocturns
They Met Young

from The People, Yes (1936)

from Complete Poems (1950)
Brim
François Villon Forgotten
The Hammer
Hammers Pounding
Dust
We Must Be Polite
Two Moon Fantasies

Uncollected Poems
Billy Sunday
God’s Children
Jerry
Black Prophetess

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-100-8 192 pages

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