Smoke and Steel was published by Harcourt, Brace in 1920. The title poem opens the collection with an extended meditation on the steel industry — the furnaces, the molten metal, the workers whose bodies are consumed by the process of production. Sandburg was explicit: “Smoke of the fields in spring is one, / Smoke of the dead volcano is another… / Smoke of a steel works at night is something else.”
The collection marks a formal development: alongside the public, declarative voice of Chicago Poems, Sandburg develops a more intimate lyric mode — shorter poems, quieter observations, imagistic precision that owes something to his friendship with the Imagists (particularly Amy Lowell). “Jazz Fantasia” captures the sound of jazz in verse rhythms; “Losers” meditates on historical defeats with compressed intensity.
The volume also contains some of Sandburg’s most overtly political work — poems about the Palmer Raids, about striking workers, about the suppression of dissent during and after World War I. These poems connected Sandburg to the socialist literary tradition but also drew criticism from modernists who felt his politics simplified his art.
Collecting Smoke and Steel
First edition (Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1920): Boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine in jacket: $100–$300
- Without jacket: $30–$80