Carl Sandburg sings of Chicago with husky-haughty lips. I like Chicago and I like poetry; but I do not much care for the combination as illustrated in Mr. Sandburg's volume, _Chicago Poems_. I think it has been overrated. It is pretentious rather than important. It is the raw material of poetry, rather than the finished product. Mere passion and imagination are not enough to make a poet, even when accompanied by indignation. If feeling and appreciation could produce poetry, then we should all be poets. But it is also necessary to know how to write. Carl Sandburg was born at Galesburg, Illinois, on the sixth of January, 1878. He has "worked his own way" through life with courage and ambition, performing any kind of respectable indoor and outdoor toil that would keep him alive. In the Spanish war, he immediately enlisted, and belonged to the first military company that went to Porto Rico. In 1898 he entered Lombard College; after his Freshman year, he tried to enter West Point, succeeding in every test--physical and mental--except that of arithmetic; there he has my hearty sympathy, for in arithmetic I was always slow but not sure. He returned to Lombard, and took the regular course for the next three years, paying his way by hard work. His literary ambition had already been awakened, and he attained distinction among his mates. Since graduation he has had constant and varied experience in journalism. For a group of poems, of which the first was _Chicago_, he was awarded the Levinson prize as the best poem by an American that had appeared in _Poetry_ during the year October 1913-October 1914. In 1916 appeared a substantial volume from his pen, called _Chicago Poems_. His work gives one the impression of being chaotic in form and content. Miss Lowell quotes him as saying, "I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way." According to G. K. Chesterton, this attitude was characteristic of modern life in general before the war. We don't know where we're going,--but let's put on more speed. Perhaps the other extreme, so characteristic of our southern African friends, is no better, yet it has a charm absent in the strenuosity of mere eagerness. A Southern negro, being asked whither he was going, replied "I aint goin' nowhar: Ise been done gone whar I was goin'!" It would appear that there is sufficient room between these extremes for individual and social progress.