This one-volume edition of Sandburg’s best and most characteristic poetry is designed for general readers and for students. The poems span Sandburg’s forty-year career and are drawn from four volumes: The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg, published in 1970; Breathing Tokens, edited after Sandburg’s death by his eldest daughter, Margaret Sandburg, in 1978; Billy Sunday and Other Poems, edited by George and Willene Hendrick in 1993; and The World of Carl Sandburg, by Norman Corwin, published in 1961. The poems are grouped by subject under eleven headings and are arranged within each section in roughly—though not slavishly—chronological order. Even if one wished to present the poems in strict chronological order, it would not be possible, for Sandburg rarely dated his poems. He tended to put them aside after they were written and would later dip into his kit bag to complete sections of whatever book he was preparing for publication at the time. At the end of this volume we list the original source of book publication of each poem in the anthology.

CHICAGO

Born to immigrant Swedish parents in the prairie town of Galesburg, Illinois, in 1876, Sandburg did not see Chicago until he was eighteen. As a boy, though, he had delivered and read Chicago newspapers, and the midwestern metropolis fascinated and lured him. When his father secured a railroad pass for his son, who was then taking one dead-end job after another, Sandburg finally got a taste of the big city. He wrote about that first visit in Always the Young Strangers. Sandburg’s Socialist friend John Sjodin, who had lived in Chicago, told him how to live cheaply in the city by the big lake. And live cheaply he did. In his three days there, he spent twenty-five cents a night for a room in a flophouse, five cents for breakfast, and ten cents each for lunch and dinner. He went to a variety show two nights, but mostly he walked and observed city life: “I . . . never got tired of the roar of the streets, the trolley cars, the teamsters, the drays, buggies, surries, and phaetons, the delivery wagons high with boxes, the brewery wagons piled with barrels. . . .” On his last day in Chicago, he went into a saloon for the free lunch there, paid his five cents for a beer, and while he was “feeding his face” he was approached by a prostitute, who asked him, “Looking fer a good time?” After an exchange of words, Sandburg finally told her, “You’re up the wrong alley, sister. I ain’t got but two nickels and they wouldn’t do you any good.” He saw Chicago for one dollar and fifty cents, and much of what he saw would later be reflected time after time in his poetry about the Windy City.

In 1912 Sandburg moved to Chicago and grew to know intimately the places he described in Chicago Poems. He worked as a newspaper reporter, haunting Chicago’s streets, cafés, and saloons and venturing into the world of prostitutes, working men and women, bums, and radicals. His memorable poem “Chicago” grew out of his overview of the city and its citizens. As his knowledge of “his” Chicago deepened, he wrote such poems as “The Windy City” and “The People, Yes,” No. 81, which, though never as widely read as “Chicago,” reflect Sandburg’s special insights and deserve careful reading. The first section in this anthology brings together his best known and less well known poems about Chicago.