Famous Smokestacks Poems by Famous Poets

These are examples of famous Smokestacks poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous smokestacks poems. These examples illustrate what a famous smokestacks poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).

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Five Towns on the B. and O

by Carl Sandburg
 BY day … tireless smokestacks … hungry smoky shanties hanging to the slopes … crooning: We get by, that’s all.
By night … all lit up … fire-gold bars, fire-gold flues … and the shanties shaking in clumsy shadows … almost the hills shaking … all crooning: By God, we’re going to find out or know why....Read more of this...

Jim Bludso, of the Prairie Belle

by John Hay
Wall, no! I can’t tell whar he lives,
Becase he don’t live, you see;
Leastways, he’s got out of the habit
Of livin’ like you and me.
Whar have you been for the last three year
That you haven’t heard folks tell
How Jimmy Bludso passed in his checks
The night of the Prairie Belle?

He war’n’t no saint,—them engineers
Is all pretty much alike,—
One wife in Natchez-under-the-Hill
And another...Read more of this...

The Sins of Kalamazoo

by Carl Sandburg
 THE SINS of Kalamazoo are neither scarlet nor crimson.

The sins of Kalamazoo are a convict gray, a dishwater drab.

And the people who sin the sins of Kalamazoo are neither scarlet nor crimson.

They run to drabs and grays—and some of them sing they shall be washed whiter than snow—and some: We should worry.

Yes, Kalamazoo is a spot on the map
And...Read more of this...

John Ericsson Day Memorial 1918

by Carl Sandburg
 INTO the gulf and the pit of the dark night, the cold night, there is a man goes into the dark and the cold and when he comes back to his people he brings fire in his hands and they remember him in the years afterward as the fire bringer—they remember or forget—the man whose head kept singing to...Read more of this...

Nights Nothings Again

by Carl Sandburg
 WHO knows what I know
when I have asked the night questions
and the night has answered nothing
only the old answers?

Who picked a crimson cryptogram,
the tail light of a motor car turning a corner,
or the midnight sign of a chile con carne place,
or a man out of the ashes of false dawn muttering “hot-dog” to the night watchmen:
Is there a spieler...Read more of this...

Hospital Window

by Allen Ginsberg
At gauzy dusk, thin haze like cigarette smoke 
ribbons past Chrysler Building's silver fins 
tapering delicately needletopped, Empire State's 
taller antenna filmed milky lit amid blocks 
black and white apartmenting veil'd sky over Manhattan, 
offices new built dark glassed in blueish heaven--The East 
50's & 60's covered with castles & watertowers, seven storied 
tar-topped house-banks over York Avenue, late may-green...Read more of this...

Picnic Boat

by Carl Sandburg
 SUNDAY night and the park policemen tell each other it
is dark as a stack of black cats on Lake Michigan.
A big picnic boat comes home to Chicago from the peach
farms of Saugatuck.
Hundreds of electric bulbs break the night's darkness, a
flock of red and yellow birds with wings at a standstill.
Running along the deck railings are festoons and leaping
in curves...Read more of this...

Joliet

by Carl Sandburg
 ON the one hand the steel works.
On the other hand the penitentiary.
Sante Fé trains and Alton trains
Between smokestacks on the west
And gray walls on the east.
And Lockport down the river.

Part of the valley is God’s.
And part is man’s.
The river course laid out
A thousand years ago.
The canals ten years back.

The sun on two canals and one river
Makes three stripes of...Read more of this...

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