“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

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