Written in the poet's unique personal idiom, these early poems include "Chicago," "Fog," "Who Am I?" "Under the Harvest Moon," plus more on war, love, death, loneliness and the beauty of nature.

Presents the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of the complete poems of twentieth-century American poet Carl Sandburg.

A collection from the Pulitzer Prize–winning American poet with “a sharp lively wit and a tender approach to the human condition” (The Philadelphia Inquirer). Though he was also renowned as a biographer of Abraham Lincoln, Carl Sandburg was first and foremost a poet—upon his death, President Lyndon B. Johnson said “Carl Sandburg was more than the voice of America, more than the poet of its strength and genius. He was America.” In this outstanding collection of seventy-seven poems, Sandburg eloquently celebrates the themes that engaged him as a poet for more than half a century of writing—life, love, and death. Strongly lyrical, these intensely honest poems testify to human courage, frailty, and tenderness and to the enduring wonders of nature. “A poetic genius whose creative power has in no way lessened with the passing years.” —Chicago Tribune

A comprehensive edition of one of America's greatest poets, this collection draws from her four published volumes, together with 50 uncollected works and translations of Octavio Paz, Max Jacob and others.

This book presents the poetry and letters of the American writer Adelaide Crapsey (1878–1914). Her best poetry deserves to be enjoyed by a larger audience, and her letters and newly discovered biographical materials reveal new charm and meaning in an intriguingly elusive character. Crapsey did not live to see any of her mature poetry published: she received notice that her first poem had been accepted for publication only a week before she died. Posthumous editions of her Verse (in 1915, 1922, and 1934), however, brought her recognition and respect. Carl Sandburg paid her a poetic tribute. American critic Yvor Winters praised her as "a minor poet of great distinction" and felt that her poems remained "in their way honest and acutely perceptive." Her best work is compressed, terse, related in this respect to the work of another American poet who won posthumous recognition, Emily Dickinson. Crapsey is best known as the inventor of the cinquain, a poem of five short lines of unequal length: one-stress, two-stress, three-stress, four-stress, and one-stress. The cinquain is one of the few modern verse forms developed in English, and its brevity and characteristic thought pattern seem to have been influenced by Japanese forms. Crapsey's indebtedness to Japanese poetry and her relation to Imagism have long been subjects for debate. As Winters notes, the work of Crapsey "achieves more effectively than did almost any of the Imagists the aims of Imagism." The critical introduction by Professor Susan Sutton Smith examines these problems. Much of Crapsey's poetry is reticent, withdrawn, and private, and she believed strongly in the individual's right to privacy. Whatever new biographical materials reveal of her and of her relations with family and friends, however, shows a charming and courageous woman. Her courage and humor show especially well in her correspondence with her friend Esther Lowenthal and in the letters with her friend Jean Webster McKinney, author of Daddy Long-Legs, who died soon after Crapsey.