Chicago Poems by Carl Sandburg

What makes Sandburg's Chicago Poems so great is that he had a way of bringing to life concrete and steel and making one aware of the inner life of things that millions of us city folk blindly pass each day. In my favorite, "Skyscraper" he says "It is the men and women, boys and girls so poured in and out all day that give the building a soul of dreams and thoughts and memories." It ends beautifully with "By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars and has a soul." This is Chicago. This is any city. Sandburg tells us if we were just to remain silent for a moment, we would hear the faint night-time "humming and thrumming" of "a copper wire slung in the air."