“Grass” brings together Carl Sandburg as both poet and historian. As poet, Sandburg explores the range and reach of free verse. The poem is profound in its philosophical argument, but ear-friendly and even conversational; its form is eccentric and striking. But Sandburg was a student of history as well. Indeed, one of his three Pulitzer Prizes recognized his multivolume biography of Abraham Lincoln. What defines both Sandburg’s poetry and his perspective of history is his unshakeable faith in the dignity of the individual. When that respect becomes ironic, as it does in war, a nation suffers. The poem then offers Sandburg’s poetic perception of the heroic value of people, drawn as much from his own experiences traveling in the Midwest as from his respect for the tender idealism of the democratic anthems of Walt Whitman. That heroism, however, is compromised by the dehumanizing reality of war. Here, with his hard-eyed view of a historian, Sandburg exposes humanity’s self-justifying and self-sustaining wonderland logic of forgetting rather than remembering its own past.

The opening tercet (a stanza consisting of three lines) of “Grass” shocks as the poem opens with a call to pile up bodies and then unceremoniously bury them.