Grass

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1918

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Historical Context: The Lost Generation

“Grass” is a product of the generation struggling to come to terms with the unprecedented butchery of The War to End All Wars, World War I. Although Carl Sandburg was a bit older than those writers, philosophers, composers, and painters who came to be called The Lost Generation, and never joined them in the expatriation to Europe, he shared their sense not so much of outrage as horror. The war introduced a range of technologically advanced weapons—poison gas, flamethrowers, trench warfare, barbed wire, tanks, airplanes, the machine gun, grenades—that ensured the most efficient slaughter of both soldiers and civilians in the history of Western civilization, at least, up to that point.

Given that the war went on for nearly six grinding years sustained by obscure decades-old alliances, Sandburg’s generation wrestled with the sense of the war’s pointlessness, as year after year casualties kept mounting—nearly nine million by the end of the war—while all the while generals seemed inept and politicians clueless. The poetry of this generation reflected that disgust over how civilized nations could conduct such barbarity. In using as his narrator grass eager to cover up the obscene reality of war’s body counts, Sandburg reflects his historical context in which artists used the medium of their craft to argue the pointlessness of wars—any wars. In this, the poem echoes Sandburg’s own brand of hopeful pessimism, as suggested by his most familiar quote about history and warfare: “Someday they will give a war and nobody’ll come.”

Historical Context: Austerlitz, Waterloo, Gettysburg, Ypres, and Verdun

Given its reference to five battles from three different wars, “Grass,” for all its brevity, offers an expansive historical context. The reader either knows or must look up references to the battles of Austerlitz, Waterloo, Gettysburg, Ypres, and Verdun, which belong to the Napoleonic Wars, the American Civil War, and World War I, respectively.

Mentioned in the first line of the poem are Austerlitz and Waterloo, both of them brutal and bloody. They bookmarked the beginning and the end of Napoleon Bonaparte’s reign over the French Empire. In 1805, outside the farming town of Austerlitz in what is now the Czech Republic, the outnumbered forces of Napoleon achieved a brilliant tactical victory against the combined armies of Austria and Russia, thus establishing Napoleon as the new French leader. More than 22,000 soldiers died during the battle. Ten years later, Napoleon would be defeated by a coalition army of Russia, Austria, Germany, and Britain at a fierce showdown near the Belgian town of Waterloo. More than 50,000 soldiers died during that nine-hour battle.

The Battle of Gettysburg, referred to in Line 4, took place in July 1863 and was the bloodiest engagement of the American Civil War, with more than 50,000 soldiers dying over the course of the three-day struggle. The Union army’s decisive victory here over Robert E. Lee’s Confederate army is often considered the turning point of the war. Four months after the battle, Abraham Lincoln delivered once of the most famous speeches in American history, the Gettysburg Address, which begins with the well-known line “Four score and seven years ago,” referring to the creation of the Declaration of Independence, and honoring the many who died in defense of its principles at Gettysburg.

Two final battles are listed in Line 5, “Ypres and Verdun,” which took place during World War I. The first, Ypres, refers to a series of engagements around the Belgian city where, during five separate battles across four years, more than 600,000 people died. Many of them were civilians—it was the first time mustard gas had ever been used in war—who died in order to protect Allied access to North Sea ports. And the other, Verdun, was one of the most notorious battle sites in the war, a strategically important French town near the German border where, near the end of the war, Allied and German forces fought for nearly a year to a stalemate that left nearly 800,000 people dead.

Sandburg uses the weighty histories of these battle sites to inject “Grass” with a sense of gravity, pacificism, optimism, pessimism, and condemnation that no doubt came from his own direct experiences with war—that no matter the death toll from a battle, once the bodies are buried, the grass begins its business of steady and reliable growing, restoring to verdant and welcoming green the field torn up and bloodied by the fighting. At the same time, once the grass has done its work, humanity can begin forgetting and start the fatal cycle anew.

Authorial Context: Carl Sandburg’s Free-Verse Poetry

Largely because of his frequent acknowledgment of it, Sandburg’s most obvious literary context is his admiration for the free-verse experiments of Walt Whitman. That influence is certainly revealed here—in “Grass,” the lines follow their own logic in length, the consonant and vowel sounds create metrical patterns that invite recitation and vary line to line, and the daring visual graphic itself unsettles expectations of what a poem should even look like.

But two unexpected influences are far more direct in their impact on Sandburg’s free verse: his homelife growing up in Galesburg and the two wandering years after he left college, when Sandburg worked selling stereoscopes door-to-door. Sandburg grew up in a neighborhood teeming with first-generation European immigrants and was raised by parents who spoke Swedish and who came into English only as an adopted language. He developed an ear for language as he learned both Swedish and English, as well as bits of the many European languages he would hear as he walked along his neighborhood. Words came to fascinate the boy, specifically how words and their sounds created emotional responses. Early on, he learned how to listen to words, how inflection and emphasis, consonants and vowels, could convey meaning. Like Whitman in New York City a generation earlier, learning what he called the colors of words by attending operas in languages he did not know, Sandburg came to hear music in words, even if he was unsure what the words actually meant.

In addition, there was Sandburg’s drifter-like life on the road. For nearly two years after leaving Lombard College, Sandburg lived as a wanderer, working as a traveling salesman selling stereoscopes, hand-held contraptions that allowed viewers to look at photos in 3-D. Sandburg’s territory stretched from Madison, Wisconsin, to Philadelphia. Sandburg came to love not so much the selling but the long conversations with working-class families, face to face, listening to their talk, how they used words, their slang, and their patterns and rhythms of conversation. This experience gifted Sandburg an ear for everyday language that created, in turn, the reader-friendly sounds of his free verse.