The second poem, “The Eastland,” about the sinking of a steamship in the Chicago River, was apparently never offered for publication, perhaps because Sandburg realized that in 1915, when it was written, it was too “raw” for any editor to accept. The Eastland was loaded with about twenty-five hundred workers and their families who were being “treated” to a company picnic by their employer when it sank, on July 24, 1915, drowning more than eight hundred. Sandburg, in an essay in the September 1915 issue of the International Socialist Review, wrote that government officials had been derelict in their duty for allowing “a cranky, unstable ancient hoodoo tub like the Eastland” to sail. It was his belief that “grim industrial feudalism stands with dripping and red hands behind the whole Eastland affair.” In the poem itself, Sandburg shifted his focus to portray sharply the human misery he saw daily in the lives of working people in the industrialized Chicago he knew so well.

Several of the shorter poems in this section which were published in Chicago Poems—“Anna Imroth,” “Child of the Romans,” “’Boes,” and others—are particularly powerful. Others, such as “Taking on Suds Men Talk,” convey equally strong messages of protest, but again, as with “The Eastland,” Sandburg probably recognized that they would be unacceptable to editors of that time. For whatever reason, most of his protest poetry about the treatment of women and their deplorable lives in the Chicago he knew went unpublished until 1993.

The last poem in this section, “Legal Midnight Hour,” though obviously written immediately after the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927, also remained unpublished until 1993. The two Italian-born anarchists living in Massachusetts were arrested in 1920 and charged with the murder of two men in a payroll holdup. They were tried, convicted, and executed. It was widely believed in the liberal circles in which Sandburg moved that they were convicted because of their anarchistic beliefs, that they were found guilty in a kangaroo court, and that the evidence against them was tainted or faked. The Chicago Daily News, where Sandburg was employed all through the 1920s, devoted thousands of column inches to the celebrated case, which mesmerized people around the world. With his series of question marks at the end of the poem Sandburg indicated that the controversy would not die after their execution, as, indeed, it has not.

LOVE POEMS

During his courtship of Lilian Steichen, sister of the photographer Edward Steichen and the woman he was to marry in June of 1908, Sandburg sent her his poem “Dream Girl”:

You will come one day in a waver of love,

Tender as dew, impetuous as rain,

The tan of the sun will be on your skin,

The purr of the breeze in your murmuring speech,

You will pose with a hill-flower grace.

You will come, with your slim, expressive arms,

A poise of the head no sculptor has caught

And nuances spoken with shoulder and neck

Your face in a pass-and-repass of moods