In this article the author starts from the premise that, although there were no renowned Indian poets at Carlisle and other Indian boarding schools in the United States, students in federal boarding schools read and wrote poetry. She argues that the rhetorically bold Carlisle poems--along with the letters and articles published in the Carlisle Indian Industrial School publications--add their aesthetic value to early twentieth-century American Indian literature and culture and set the stage for reading the future work of American Indian public intellectuals. Despite the difficulty of ascertaining Indian authorship--or merely authorship--of many of the poems published at Carlisle, such early exercises in poetry emerging from the most (in)famous Indian boarding school in the country offer palpable evidence about early twentieth-century Indian writing and its engagement with one of the literary genres--poetry--that many Indians were already proficient in. (Contains 5 figures and 80 notes.)