Carl Sandburg: Selected Poems

A fresh look at the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet laureate of the American Midwest

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 re...