LIMITED

By: Carl Sandburg
June 4, 2025

A series dedicated to poems, published c. 1900–1935, the Radium Age sf-adjacent themes of which include: dystopia and utopia, far-out mathematics and the fourth dimension, Afro-futurism, catastrophe, future war, new technologies, scientific breakthrough, dehumanization, cosmic awe, disenchantment and unseen forces, unknowable aliens and singularity. Research and selection by Joshua Glenn; thematic index here.

I am riding on a limited express, one of the
     crack trains of the nation.
Hurtling across the prairie into blue haze
     and dark air go fifteen all-steel coaches
     holding a thousand people.
(All the coaches shall be scrap and rust and
     all the men and women laughing in the
     diners and sleepers shall pass into
     ashes.)
I ask a man in the smoker where he going
     and he answers: “Omaha.”

— first published 1915

Sandburg here, as elsewhere, contrasts the grand scale of modern industrial progress with the temporary, fragile nature of human existence. The exchange at the end reminds us that most of us are so absorbed in our daily routines (so “limited,” if you will) that we remain oblivious to our ultimate, inevitable fate.

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RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF POETRY: Stephen Spender’s THE PYLONS | George Sterling’s THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS | Archibald MacLeish’s EINSTEIN | Thomas Thornely’s THE ATOM | C.S. Lewis’s DYMER | Stephen Vincent Benét’s METROPOLITAN NIGHTMARE | Robert Frost’s FIRE AND ICE | Aldous Huxley’s FIFTH PHILOSOPHER’S SONG | Sara Teasdale’s “THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS” | Edith Södergran’s ON FOOT I HAD TO… | Robert Graves’s WELSH INCIDENT | Nancy Cunard’s ZEPPELINS | D.H. Lawrence’s WELLSIAN FUTURES | & many more.