Hog butchers, beggars, and busboys: poverty, labor, and the making of modern American poetry

To make poetry out of the unpoetical: Modern American poetry and the labor problem

"Thinking / Of the Freezing Poor": The Suburban Counterpastoral in William Carlos Williams's early poetry

Aware and awareless: T. S. Eliot's labor problems

"Starve, freeze": Edna St. Vincent Millay, conspicuous privation, and the political economy of Bohemia

"Yes, sir!": Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and the poetics of serving

A lost art of work: the fate of the craft ideal in Carl Sandburg's Chicago poems

Conclusion: Distinctions with and without a difference.