SOURCE: Boynton, Percy H. “The Voice of Chicago: Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg.” English Journal 11, no. 10 (December 1922): 610-20.

In the following excerpt, Boynton discusses Sandburg as a Chicago writer, the “brutality” of his language, his concern with social injustice, and his poetic frankness.

… With the years just following the World's Fair of 1893, Chicago

Gigantic, wilful, young, … With restless violent hands and casual tongue 

became vocal in a new way. The city had never been voiceless, though up to these years the rest of the country had heard little from it but the shouts from the wheat pit and the uproar of the Haymarket Riots. Long after Far West and Gulf and Tidewater and Southern Mountain regions had been heard from in poetry and fiction, Chicago had not told a story, written a song, or painted a picture. The school child—who is averagely unschooled in contemporary literature...