Smoke and Steel
Carl Sandburg, Susan Lynn Peterson
eBook
(Alcuin Classics, Oct. 5, 2012)
Carl Sandburg's "Smoke and Steel" was published four years after his famous "Chicago Poems." Though it is not as well known as that first volume, it shows a maturing of Sandburg's style. It also helped cement Sandburg's reputation as a poet in touch with the pulse of everyday America. "Smoke and Steel" is Sandburg's reflections on the people and landscape of the working people of America.This Alcuin Classics Digital edition of a 1920 public domain edition of "Smoke and Steel" has been carefully scanned and proofread. Because meaning can be found in the format of poems, this edition maintains the formatting of the original book as much as possible. Sandburg's indentations and sometime idiosyncratic punctuation remain intact.Carl Sandburg, recipient of three Pulitzer Prizes and a Grammy Award, was a twentieth century poet of considerable celebrity. Since his death in 1967, several schools have been renamed in his honor, and the United State Post Office has issued a stamp bearing his image. He rose to this level of celebrity from modest beginnings. Born in 1878, the son of Swedish immigrants, Sandburg left school at age 13. He drove a milk wagon, shoveled coal, waited on hotel guests, and served in the Army Infantry during the Spanish-American War. Throughout his career, he was known as a working man's poet. The reputation was well earned as he knew manual labor first-hand.During the first thirty-plus years of his life, as he worked as everything from door-to-door salesman to private secretary, he wrote and honed his ear for language. His first book of poems, "Chicago Poems," was published in 1916 when he was 38. His description of Chicago as "Hog Butcher for the World/Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat/Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler,/Stormy, Husky, Brawling, City of the Big Shoulders" is well known these many years later.