ABSTRACT
Chicago Poems The last of his books to be published while Carl Sandburg was a member of the Socialist Party, Chicago Poems (1916) assured the poet of a wide national audience as well as critical attention for the first time, thanks to the important publisher Henry Holt and Company (Sandburg's other volumes had, so far, been published by small presses). Critic Mark Van Wienen (1991) has defined the poems in the collection as "protests both against much of conventional American political life and against established literary practice," revealing that "Sandburg was busy propagating American socialism not only in his work as an organizer and a newspaperman, but also in the supposedly apolitical realm of literature. "
