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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 811.52
EAN num: 9780486280578
ISBN number: 0486280578
Label: Dover Publications
Manufacturer: Dover Publications
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 80
Printing Date: May 20, 1994
Publishing house: Dover Publications
Sale Popularity Level: 605808
Studio: Dover Publications
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Product Description:
Written in the poet's unique personal idiom, these early poems include 'Chicago,' 'Fog,' 'To a Contemporary Bunkshooter,' 'Who Am I?' and 'Under the Harvest Moon,' as well as many others on themes of war, immigrant life, death, love, loneliness and the beauty of nature. New introductory Note. Alphabetical lists of titles and very first lines.
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Rated by buyers 
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I love the Dover Trift Editions. They're a bit flimsy, but for the price, they can't be beat. Carl Sandburg's poems paint a colorful, often exiting, and always memoramble picture of city life at the turn of the century. These poems are simple, honest, and without a drop of pretention. This is a good read for anyone, not just poetry fanatics; but don't take my word for it, check it out at your local library.
Rated by buyers -
Sandburg is direct and strong and clear. This collection of poems very first published in 1916 has as its signature poem "Chicago''. Chicago, the toolmaker, meat butcher, stacker of wheat the great brawler of the cities is at once Sandburg's home and posture to the world. Sandburg can also write tenderly as of the famous "Fog" that comes in on 'little cats feet' and with moving power of love ( Tell me in the grave, if the lovers are the losers) and war( Shovel them high at Ypres... I am the dust I cover them all) .
He is a poet of the American experience, the American street and its people . And he is like the beloved Lincoln he would write a long biography of, a man of the people whose poetry is truly for the people.
The People Yes.
Rated by buyers 
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Sadly, Chicago Poems (1916), the author's very first published work, is the book for which self-styled folk poet Carl Sandburg is best remembered today. The collection takes a hard and unswerving look at the grim realities of urban life for the common man, funneled through the flume of the author's committed socialist ideological perspective. Such an approach to poetry may have been somewhat novel in the America of the time, and both history and critics have been kind to Sandburg's sympathetic portraits of human suffering.
But whether he is addressing "a dago shovelman," an immigrant who has forgotten the dignified being his ancestors in Europe or who can no longer recognize "the new-mown hay smell calling on the wind," a street walker with "haggard poems and desperate eyes," or a young woman burned to death in a factory fire, Sandburg continually adopts the simplistic notion that the lower economic strata of society is always victimized but virtuous, while governmental institutions, bosses of all stripes, the professional classes, and the wealthy are uniformly cruel, oppressive, exploitive, and, at best, indifferent.
Thus, Chicago Poems reads like a 132-page polemic with a very narrow political point of view. While many of the author's observations are poignantly insightful (such as the poverty-stricken family of a dead boy in 'The Right To Grief,' who are "glad it is gone, for the rest of the family will now have more to eat and wear"), the poems, when read together, take on an oppressively unbalanced character of their own.
In 'A Fence,' for example, "the rabble and all vagabonds and hungry men and wandering children looking for a place to play" stand outside the gates of a newly constructed "stone house on the lake front" built by a wealthy man, who, the poet infers, can be nothing but immoral, amoral, or corrupt. In the author's Usher-esque vision, nothing will be able to pass through the gates to the property except "Death and the Rain and Tomorrow." And tomorrow, for such a corrupt individual or family, will inevitably bring nothing but waves of bad conscience and fevered isolation. 'Soiled Dove' examines the life of a woman who "was not a harlot until she married a corporation lawyer," but who automatically becomes one by acquiescing to such a marriage, and who soon discovers her husband also loves "six other women," as if marital infidelity was limited exclusively to the upper economic classes. In contrast, 'Happiness' is confidently represented as "a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with their women and children and a keg of beer and an accordion," an image which may seem simultaneously naïve, patronizing, and condescending to many readers.
Occasionally, Sandburg wisely acknowledges that some portion of the tragedies of man's existence are simply inherent in the natural human life cycle. "The hand of God" also comes in for blame in several poems.
Chicago Poems is most effective when Sandburg bypasses social divisionalism--as he often did in his later volumes of poetry--and simply addresses the everyman in the individual. While these poems are often infused with a lyrical and tender sentimentality slightly reminiscent of James Whitcomb Riley, they also locate and acknowledge the beautiful within the tragedies that perpetually arise from human frailty, vulnerability, and mortality. In 'Dream In The Dusk,' the author warns that "tears and loss and broken dreams may find your heart at dusk," while 'Under The Harvest Moon' identifies "Death" as "the gray mocker, [who] comes to you as a beautiful friend who remembers." 'I Sang' describes a lover who has given up his heart to "you and the moon," but "only the moon remembers, and is kind to me."
Other poems have the more pronounced folk character of Sandburg's later volumes. The speaker in 'Theme In Yellow' is the pumpkin, who celebrates the paganistic dance of children around him "on the last day of October...singing ghost songs and love to the harvest moon...I am the jack-o-lantern with terrible teeth and the children know I am fooling."
The most recent edition of The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg (2003), which contains Chicago Poems in its entirety, is 832 pages long, and provides its readership with the full range of Sandburg's original and often gloriously rich and sensual vision of life. It also contains works like 'At The Gates of Tombs,' from Slabs of the Sunburnt West (1922), in which Sandburg, "the crazy wild dreamer," more fully and maturely developed his political vision. Comparatively, the reductive, often despairing Chicago Poems reads like the immaturely polarized work that it is.
Rated by buyers -
A few weeks after September 11 2001, I came across the poem "Skyscraper" by Sandburg by chance in a huge volume of American poetry. In the millions of lines written about that horrible day, I found his words from 70 years ago to be the most moving. Here are some lines from that poem:
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BY day the skyscraper looms in the smoke and sun and has a soul.
Prairie and valley, streets of the city, pour people into it and they mingle among its twenty floors and are poured out again back to the streets, prairies and valleys.
It is the men and women, boys and girls so poured in and out all day that give the building a soul of dreams and thoughts and memories...
Hour by hour the caissons reach down to the rock of the earth and hold the building to a turning planet.
Hour by hour the girders play as ribs and reach out and hold together the stone walls and floors....
Men who sunk the pilings and mixed the mortar are laid in graves where the wind whistles a wild song without words
And so are men who strung the wires and fixed the pipes and tubes and those who saw it rise floor by floor.
Souls of them all are here, even the hod carrier begging at back doors hundreds of miles away and the brick-layer who went to state's prison for shooting another man while drunk...
Ten-dollar-a-week stenographers take letters from corporation officers, lawyers, efficiency engineers, and tons of letters go bundled from the building to all ends of the earth.
Smiles and tears of each office girl go into the soul of the building just the same as the master-men who rule the building.
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I have never studied Sandburg, but it seems to me he shares that same love of humanity and fairness that Walt Whitman was so famous for, along with the ability to craft lines as amazing as "hold the building to a turning planet". His love of his modern city seems like a remnant from another age, but his absolute belief in class equality is as relevant as any 2001 street protest.
Rated by buyers 
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Wonderful and authentic, a great collection for any Sandburg devotee or any patriotic Chicagoan. I was a little disappointed with the actual quality of the book, binding and covers, but it is not an expensive edition and the collection is priceless. A must read!
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