Poet · Modernist
Carl Sandburg
American poet · 1878–1967
Carl Sandburg, the son of Swedish immigrants in Galesburg, Illinois, worked as a milk-truck driver, hotel porter, and hobo before becoming the poet of industrial America. Chicago Poems (1916) opens with his famous portrait of the city as "Hog Butcher for the World" — brawling, broad-shouldered, and unapologetic.
He could also be impossibly delicate: "Fog," just six lines long, watches the fog come in "on little cat feet" and is many readers' first free-verse poem. He won three Pulitzer Prizes — two for poetry and one for his monumental biography of Abraham Lincoln — and toured the country singing folk songs with a guitar.
His early collections, including Chicago Poems (1916) and Smoke and Steel (1920), are in the public domain in the US.
1 poem by Carl Sandburg
Full text, free to read — all in the public domain.