Harriet Monroe, a fellow resident of Chicago, had recently founded the magazine Poetry at around this time.

Monroe liked and encouraged Sandburg's plain-speaking free verse style, strongly reminiscent of Walt Whitman.

For example, the direct criticism of "Billy Sunday" by name, previously published in The Masses and International Socialist Review,[1] was replaced with the more tepid and anonymous "To a Contemporary Bunkshooter".

[2][3][4] Chicago Poems established Sandburg as a major figure in contemporary literature.

[5] Chicago Poems, and its follow-up volumes of verse, Cornhuskers (1918) and Smoke and Steel (1920) represent Sandburg's attempts to found an American version of social realism, writing expansive verse in praise of American agriculture and industry.