Sandburg's "Fog" and the Imagist Movement Anonymous College

Out of all of the poems written by Carl Sandburg, an early twentieth-century poet of the Imagist school, “Fog” may be his most famous. This may seem surprising; it’s a deceptively simple poem, only six lines long, with no real discernible meter or rhyme scheme. However, the significance of this poem lies not only in the latent power of its imagery, but also in the groundbreaking poetic tradition in which it participates, and of which it was one of the earliest examples.

Carl Sandburg composed “Fog” in the year 1916. World War I was raging, and bringing with it massive social changes, the repercussions of which we still feel today. In literature, and poetry specifically, the austerities of the war and the harshness of the reality which people the world over were being forced, for the first time, to face brought about an entirely new style. Works of literature composed at this time became crisper, less romantic, more realistic - and no genre exhibited this shift more obviously than the poem. Carl Sandburg was clearly writing within this tradition; in a review of his work, one critic states that he “has the unassailable and immovable earthbound strength of a great granite rock which shows a weather-worn surface above the soil.”[1]...