Poetry in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath

Great crawlers, like insects, 

Diesel tractors puttered, stood idle. 

The rusted, encrusted Oklahoma plains

raised gloved, goggled, rubber dust masked men

who sat in iron seats with muzzled speech

and thundered the snub-nosed monsters

across the flat land for profit.

The men watch the disks behind them,

the blades that dig their elbows into the land, 

as they process a winter of meal. 

(Pg 154, paragraphs 1-3)

I liked Steinbeck's use of adjectives. Gloved, goggled, rubber dust mask was my favorite sentence fragment. It's so unexpected in this book uses a series of dusty-type metaphors to show the grey-ness of the land and the situation in which the Joads were in. This was extremely refreshing. The words used in this passage were actually very beautiful and created an exciting image in my mind, so I wanted to mirror that with my found poem. I tried to use a bunch of unexpected words together and I think it worked really well!