"Sandburg in his poems uses neither metre nor rhyme, but if he gives an impression of ragged ease it is not much more than a surface impression. His verse... is highly organized; it is not free verse at all, in the common acceptance of the word. Rather it is repetitive verse. He uses parallel constructions; he repeats words and phrases with great skill; thereby he produces effects as complex and difficult sometimes as those of Swinburne's most intricate ballades. ...Sandburg is alien to most of the Anglo-Saxon elements in American life. Its aspects which he chooses to describe are those precisely which distinguish it from life in England. He talks about stockyards, wide sweeping prairies, the growth of mushroom cities, Hell on the Wabash, Watch your Step. He talks about booze runners, hankey panks, humpties (whatever they are) bulls, and Charlie Chaplin. He never mentions tea, gentlemen, golf, or any other of our briticisms. He is an American; not an Amayrican with the r trilled lightly against the upper teeth as in Back Bay, but a ril Amurricn. He avoids the language along with everything else that is English. He never wrote an American dictionary, but he does something more hazardous and exciting: he writes American. With earlier authors American was a dialect; it was the speech of the comedian and the soubrette; the hero, when serious, declaimed his Sunday-best Oxford. The case is opposite with Sandburg. He writes American when he is pompous, philosophic, sentimental; in a word when he is most upstage... Sandburg writes American like a foreign language, like a language freshly acquired in which each word has a new and fascinating meaning. It is a language, in fact, which never existed before; the separate words existed, but in the speech of no one man; Sandburg was the first to thesaurize them."