Travel back to 1914 when Chicago's skyscrapers and Chicago's poets were defining modernist reach and audacity. In this video [7:46] excerpted from Poetry in America, host Elisa New considers the rise of the skyscraper -- and the emergence of the modernist poem -- in an episode featuring celebrated architect Frank Gehry, Chinese visionary and real estate developer Zhang Xin, poet Robert Polito, and student poets from around the United States. And what about today? Can a building, as Sandburg asserts, have "soul," and who gives it that soul?

Common Core

RL.8.10 RL.6.10 RL.7.10