This is the process of the book and of the poet’s progress: The Chicago poems; he has worked his vengeance; from the cinders and ashes, glowing still, rise sparks, brilliant and tiny. (He calls them _Handfuls_.) The stifling smoulder of the War poems to the warm rich glow of The Road and the End and the flame of the fire with its attendant fogs and then grim shadows. As a confession, or rather a solidifying of the entire force of the poet, he reveals the _Other Days_, quite as intense as the present mood. This from the last of that section: Snatch the gag from thy mouth, child, And be free to keep silence. Tell no man anything for no man listens, Yet hold thy lips ready to speak. Why should a man speak? When there are things to say, such as the _Red Son_, always have your lips ready to speak: I am going away and I never come back to you; Crags and high rough places call me, Great places of death Where men go empty-handed And pass over smiling To the star-drift on the horizon rim; My last whisper shall be alone, unknown; I shall go to the city and fight against it, And make it give me passwords Of luck and love, women worth dying for, And money. I go where you wist not of Nor I nor any man nor woman. I only know I go to storms Grappling against things wet and naked. There is no pity of it and no blame None of us is in the wrong. After all it is only this: You for the little hills and I go away. Poetry has grown stronger in your eyes? Thus has Carl Sandburg in one book gone the entire range of a life today. The humanitarian poet as well as the artist-poet. He has proven things—and peoples. The nigger: foam of teeth ... breaking crash of laughter; Mrs. Gabrielle Giovannitti: with that kindling wood piled on her head, coming along Peoria street nine o’clock in the morning; Jan Kubelik: girls of Bohemia ... in the hills with their lovers; Chick Lorimer: a wild girl keeping a hold on a dream she wants; Mischa Elman: a singing fire and a climb of roses; the plowboy: turning the turf in the dusk and haze of an April gloaming; the gypsy: her neck and head the top piece of a Nile obelisk. He has known uplands when the great strong hills are humble; losses: and one day we will hold only the shadows; wars: in the wars to come kings kicked under the dust and millions of men following great causes not yet dreamed out in the heads of men; joy: sent on singing, singing, smashed to the hearts under the ribs with a terrible love; the mist: at the first of things, I will be at the last; and The Great Hunt: