_Chicago Poems_ (1916) is full of ferment; it seethes with a direct poetry surcharged with tremendous energy. Here is an almost animal exultation that is also an exaltation. Sandburg’s speech is simple and powerful; he uses slang as freely (and beautifully) as his predecessors used the now archaic tongue of their times. (See Preface.) Immediately the cries of protest were heard: Sandburg was coarse and brutal; his work ugly and distorted; his language, unrefined, unfit for poetry. His detractors forgot that Sandburg was only brutal when dealing with brutality; that beneath his toughness, he was one of the tenderest of living poets; that, when he used colloquialisms and a richly metaphorical slang, he was searching for new poetic values in “limber, lasting, fierce words”—unconsciously answering Whitman who asked, “Do you suppose the liberties and brawn of These States have to do only with delicate lady-words? With gloved gentleman-words?” _Cornhuskers_ (1918) is another step forward; it is fully as sweeping as its forerunner and far more sensitive. The gain in power and restraint is evident in the very first poem, a magnificent panoramic vision of the prairie. Here is something of the surge of a Norse saga; _Cornhuskers_ is keen with a salty vigor, a vast sympathy for all that is splendid and terrible in Nature. But the raw violence is restrained to the point of mysticism. There are, in this volume, dozens of those delicate perceptions of beauty that must astonish those who think that Sandburg can write only a big-fisted, rough-neck sort of poetry. “Cool Tombs,” one of the most poignant lyrics of our time, moves with a new music; “Grass” whispers as quietly as the earlier “Fog” stole in on stealthy, cat feet. _Smoke and Steel_ (1920) is the synthesis and sublimation of its predecessors. In this ripest of his collections, Sandburg has fused mood, accent and image in a new intensity. It is a fit setting for the title-poem; it is, in spite of certain over-mystical accents, an epic of industrialism. Smoke-belching chimneys are here, quarries and great boulders of iron-ribbed rock; here are titanic visions: the dreams of men and machinery. And silence is here—the silence of sleeping tenements and sun-soaked cornfields. _Smoke and Steel_ is a rich amalgam; indigenous to the core. And what makes it so vital is Sandburg’s own spirit: a never-sated joy in existence, a continually fresh delight in the variety and wonder of life. COOL TOMBS When Abraham Lincoln was shoveled into the tombs, he forgot the copperheads and the assassin ... in the dust, in the cool tombs. And Ulysses Grant lost all thought of con men and Wall Street, cash and collateral turned ashes ... in the dust, in the cool tombs.