Chicago Poems.

SANDBURG, Carl.

Item Number: 53021

New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1916.

First edition of the author’s first regularly published book. Octavo, original cloth. Signed by Carl Sandburg opposite the title page. In very good condition. First issue with the advertisement dated “3’16” at the rear.

Chicago Poems was Carl Sandburg's first-published book of verse. Written in the poet's unique, personal idiom, these poems embody a soulfulness, lyric grace, and a love of and compassion for the common man that earned Sandburg a reputation as a "poet of the people." Among the dozens of poems in this collection are such well-known verses as "Chicago," "Fog," "To a Contemporary Bunkshooter," "Who Am I?" and "Under the Harvest Moon," as well as numerous others on themes of war, immigrant life, death, love, loneliness, and the beauty of nature. These early poems reveal the simplicity of style, honesty, and vision that characterized all of Sandburg's work and earned him enormous popularity in the 1920s and '30s and a Pulitzer prize in poetry in 1951.