Chicago

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Chicago

Carl Sandburg 1916

Carl Sandburg’s first major volume of poems, Chicago Poems, published in 1916, offered the poem “Chicago,” which would go on to be one of the most famous poems that Sandburg wrote. It is a classic example of his form and subject as it uses free verse to reveal, explore, and celebrate the lives of common people. The themes of hard work, suffering, and survival are presented alongside those of laughter and youth with an almost brutal honesty that Sandburg extracted from the everyday language he listened to so closely throughout his life. The opening lines set the poem apart from much of the poetry of the time with “Hog Butcher of the World,” and the list of epithets that follow. Sandburg’s poetry relied on themes of common, daily life in the same way that the poems of Walt Whitman had. Using a major urban landscape as a focus, the speaker goes on to mention the harsh yet vibrant aspects of American progress. There is violence and hunger in the city, and also the pride of a city so alive. The poem then offers another list, descriptions of work actions, and the line “Building, breaking, rebuilding” which could be seen to represent the cyclical nature of production and consumption in modern industrial life. The poem finishes with a definite emphasis on the experience of laughter, which offers another side of America often found in Sandburg’s poetry—that of a country worthy of joyous celebration and livelihood in the face of hardship and progress.

Author Biography

Sandburg was born in 1878, one of seven children of hardworking, conservative Swedish immigrants in Galesburg, Illinois. Despite his interest in reading and writing, Sandburg was forced to leave school at age thirteen to help supplement the family income. He held a number of odd jobs, including work as a milk delivery boy, a barber shop porter, and an apprentice tinsmith. Looking for adventure, Sandburg spent three-and-a-half months traveling around the country via railroad at age nineteen. In 1898 he volunteered for service in the Spanish-American War and was stationed in Puerto Rico. Upon his discharge he enrolled at Lombard College in Galesburg and studied there for four years. He left in 1902 before graduating and held a number of jobs before finding his niche as a writer. In 1908 he married Lillian Paula Steichen, sister of photographer Edward Steichen, and eventually fathered three daughters.

Sandburg finally became a recognized writer in 1914 when Poetry: A Magazine of Verse published six of his poems. In addition to poetry, Sandburg wrote a number of books—from children’s stories to biographies. He won the Pulitzer Prize twice, once (in history) in 1939 for Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (a detailed work larger than the collected writings of Shakespeare) and again in 1951 for Complete Poems (1950), a cumulation of his six previous volumes of poetry. Sandburg wrote his final book of poetry at age 85 and died four years later, in 1967, at his home in Flat Rock, North Carolina, where he and his family had lived since 1945.

Poem Text

   Hog Butcher for the World,
   Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
   Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight
      Handler;
   Stormy, husky, brawling.
   City of the Big Shoulders:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them,
      for I have seen your painted women under
      the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer:
      Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill
      and go free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is:
      On the faces of women and children I have
      seen the marks of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those
      who sneer at this my city, and I give them
      back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head
      singing so proud to be alive and coarse and
      strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job
      on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid
      against the little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action,
      cunning as a savage pitted against the
      wilderness,
   Bareheaded,
   Shoveling,
   Wrecking,
   Planning,
   Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing
      with  white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a
      young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who
      has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the
      pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the
      people,
   Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of
      Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be
      Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of
      Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight
      Handler to the Nation.

Media Adaptations

The Poetry of Carl Sandburg, read by Melissa Manchester, Carl Reiner, Burt Reynolds, Jean Smart and others was released on audio cassette by Dove Audio in 1996.
An audio cassette titled A Lincoln Album is available through Caedmon’s “Voices in Time” series.
A record titled Carl Sandburg Sings His American Songbook was released by Caedmon in 1967.
Decca released the album Carl Sandburg Reads the Poems of Carl Sandburg in 1957.

Poem Summary

Lines 1-5

Sandburg begins the poem with a list of names or epithets for the city that reflects its gritty, earthy, tough spirit. In the early twentieth century Chicago was a center for the industries Sandburg mentions. In these lines the speaker personifies the city by likening it to a “Stormy, husky, brawling” worker, with “Big Shoulders.” This list also evokes the human workers who actually perform the work associated with these industries, thus establishing a link between the city and its inhabitants, and beginning a process of merging human qualities with the abstract “idea” of the city. In addition, by being identified with the city, each person seems to represent a combination of the individual and the universal. This is consistent with Sandburg’s desire to elevate the working people to a level of great importance and claim them to be essential elements of larger social organizations.

Lines 6-8

In these lines the speaker addresses a series of criticisms of the city followed by concrete images from the speaker’s own experience which illustrate the criticisms. The city’s wickedness is demonstrated by its prostitutes that corrupt innocent boys, its crookedness by killers that go unpunished, and its brutality by the hunger seen in the faces of its women and children. Here the speaker advances the personification of the city begun in the first stanza by directly addressing it as “you” and also by attributing the human qualities of wickedness, crookedness, and brutality to it. At this point in the poem Sandburg shifts to much longer lines and a more lyrical use of language, partially to mimic the conversational language of the direct address, but also as a way to increase the tempo and energy of the lines.

Notice how Sandburg has used rhetorical strategies to help hold lines 6-8 together. First, he has used parallelism by having each set of two lines begin with a criticism, and then offers an image to illustrate it. He also begins the first line of each set of two (lines 6, 8, and 10) with almost the same phrase: “they tell me.…” This repetition of a phrase at the beginning of lines is called anaphora, and as well as providing a certain organization to a poem it can create a smoother, more musical sound.

Line 9

At this point, while not breaking the form of long lines, the poems shifts from criticism of the city to a defense. The speaker of the poem, having admitted the presence of negative elements, prepares to respond to “those who sneer,” or the anonymous critics of the city.

Line 10

Here the speaker continues the double reference to the “you” of the poem, describing it as a “city and lifted head,” as a town and as a person. This is then followed by a number of positive adjectives with which the speaker attempts to balance or even override whatever negative conditions may exist in America’s modern cities. It is implied that the negative conditions are the result of being alive, of living, and also that the city and its people are “strong and cunning” enough to survive and be proud.

Line 11

Although struggling with work and toil, the speaker asserts that Chicago, “tall and bold against the little soft cities,” is better than smaller, perhaps kinder cities. This also inverts the comparison earlier in the stanza where the city was “wicked” and “brutal” to its citizens.

Line 12

As a last gesture before the poem moves back to a focused, short-lined list, the speaker reinforces the resourcefulness and survival abilities of the city in the face of hardship. This is done with the use of simile, a poetic technique that compares two unlike things to offer further insight or description. In the example here, Chicago is compared to a wild dog struggling for survival, relying on his instincts to keep him alive.

Lines 13-17

Here Sandburg shifts back to the list form which gives particular emphasis to the words in these lines and also slows the pace of the poem. This list describes the city, drawing a comparison to a laborer. As in the first stanza the description of the city reflects all of the individuals who make up the city. This list might also be taken as a way of seeing the circular nature of modern, industrial America as it moves from “building,” to “breaking,” and then back to “rebuilding,” as well as the cycle of each individual as he or she works, encounters hardship, and carries on through it to better times.

Lines 18-21

With line 18 the poem turns toward the sentiment that will take it to its end. This is a feeling of celebration—even in the fatigue and dirt of work—found in the universal symbol of laughter. Again the lines are extended as the poem reinvokes the youthful energy and joy found even “Under the terrible burden of destiny.” To emphasize his point, Sandburg uses the repetition of the word “laughter” as it appears in some form nine times from this line to the end of the poem. It is this celebration of people’s ability to overcome nature’s hardship, to laugh and enjoy life despite it, that made Sandburg known as a poet of the people. Notice too how in line 21 the speaker of the poem synthesizes the individual and the communal by claiming that under the city’s ribs lies “the heart of the people.” This could be seen as a unifying gesture in the same way that the earlier list of laborers was melded into a collective city.

Line 22

In one final attempt to focus attention on celebration, and again to alter the pace of the lines just before its conclusion, Sandburg uses another one word line and this time indents the line further than those previous. This is a good example of how free verse uses form to denote pacing and give emphasis to certain lines or words within the poem.

Line 23

In the final line the poem continues with this concept of laughter, enforcing the positive tone of the ending of the poem. The laughter leads into a list of epithets almost exactly like that at the beginning of the poem. This technique provides a certain closure to the poem, ending back where it started. This time, the speaker makes it clear that Chicago is “proud” of what it is. Here also, the list of epithets is run in—one right after another—rather than being broken up into shorter lines as in the first stanza. One argument for this technique might be to lead the reader to the poem’s ending with a constant rhythm and pace.

Themes

Strength and Weakness

This poem praises the city of Chicago for its power and vitality, using sharp, powerful, vital words to make the reader experience the writer’s idea. The images in the first stanza, as well as the isolated words in the second (“bareheaded,” “shoveling,” etc.) would not generally be considered flattering, but they are so frequent, so unrelenting, that they serve to make the reader more aware of the strength that is required for a brutal city to survive. Left unexamined is the other standard component of brutality, the absence of intellect, even though intellectualism is usually associated with poetry. Sandburg takes us back to a more primitive perspective. It is a point of view we see more frequently in ancient poetry, from times when civilization was just being organized; Sandburg’s idea of the city hearkens back to The Iliad or the Bible’s Old Testament. The poet provides us with an explanation for why a city needs to be strong with the image of “a savage pitted against the wilderness”: if the world at large is seen as a wilderness, then it would certainly take a city of great physical strength to hold its nastier aspects at bay. This point is made more explicitly when the poem mentions “the little soft cities” that surround Chicago and set it off. From an urban perspective, the small farm towns of the American Midwest are seen as places of naive, passive victims just ready to fall prey to disasters—both natural and social. In 1914, when the population was beginning its great shift from rural to urban life, the strength of cities must have stirred strong emotions. This would, in part, have accounted for why such a shift occurred and why America is predominantly urban today. Ironically, today’s city dwellers find the urban life threatening, not protective, and they look nostalgically at “weak” small-town life for its civility.

Topics for Further Study

The tone of pride in Sandburg’s poem has remained part of the city of Chicago’s image. Write a poem to the town or city you live in, retaining the tone that Sandburg used.
Compare this poem to Walt Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing,” also included in this volume of Poetry for Students. What similarities are there in style? In images? How do you think these elements help an author write about a place?
Do you think the things Sandburg says about Chicago are true about most big cities, or does each city have its own particular character?

Moral Corruption

The opening lines of this poem are delivered with a lofty tone of reverence, even though the specific graces that are attributed to Chicago—from hog butchering to big shoulders—are not the sort of features that usually elicit praise. Having established the working-class ethos that he will use to measure the city’s greatness, Sandburg goes on to directly address the charges of moral corruption that get pinned on large urban centers. The charge of wickedness he accepts without offering any justification, but in his reply he makes a point of mentioning the “farm boys” who are presented as victims of the “painted ladies,” but who are also outsiders: the poem seems to suggest that at least some of the blame for this seduction lies with the boys, for coming to the city in the first place. His second response is even more unapologetic: there is no way to accept or justify murder, and in the case he states it is even more horrible because the killers are not repentant (since they do it again), yet are set free due to crookedness. There is nothing in either the individual’s crime or society’s response to it to soften or mitigate the evilness. In the third example, though, Sandburg’s reply is specifically presented to suggest a whole world of psychological insight. As before, he does not pretend that the accusation, in this case brutality, is not true. Instead, he attributes its root cause to innocence. The hungry women and children may be victims of the city’s brutality, but their struggle to survive is just as likely brutality’s root cause. From that point on, the poem links struggle with glory, indicating that moral compromise is a necessary step on the path to that glory.

Pride

The adjectives that the poem applies to Chicago tell the whole story: “proud,” “coarse,” “strong,” “cunning,” “fierce,” and even the quick, unnecessary mention that the teeth of the city’s personification are “white.” The phrase “this my city” tells us not only the facts, but also about Sandburg’s emotional relationship with Chicago: underlying any conceptual points that this poem is trying to make about Chicago is the poet’s admission that the subject is personal. He holds off until the middle of the poem to make this bond clear, but for the first half we know that we are supposed to admire the city, even with its wickedness, crookedness, and brutality. Sandburg is able to steer the reader’s emotions in the beginning of the poem because of his controlled language. Once it is called his city, we can see that the speaker of the poem identifies himself with Chicago, and so it is easy to see why he has wanted us to see through the city’s darker aspects to its greatness.

Given the oppressive labor and moral corruption associated with the day-to-day operations of a big city, it is reasonable to ask why Chicago is shown, in the end, so proud of itself. The key is in the poem’s one isolated word, “laughing.” Laughter absorbs indignation and horror, allowing the city to concentrate upon its accomplishments. Sandburg presents the city’s faults in this poem, but he allows the city to remain untouched by its own faults: the pride the city feels for itself might be based on ignorance, but the poet still admires it.

Style

“Chicago,” is written in free verse, which means that it conforms to neither a particular meter nor rhyme scheme. It is a style that caused many people difficulty in recognizing works like “Chicago” as poems. One reason Sandburg might have chosen to break from traditional form is that he wanted to speak in the language of the common people, which does not come in careful, predictable cadence. Sandburg felt that common speech had its own particular music and he wanted to capture it. This would allow him to offer his poems back to the people in a language familiar to them. He also believed that the poems could more accurately represent the American experience with extended lines that sprawl and stretch out like the American landscape itself. In “Chicago” he alternates between a list form:

  Bareheaded,
  Shoveling,
  Wrecking,
  Planning,

and more extended lines such as this:

  Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of
        Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be
        Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of
        Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight
        Handler to the Nation.

This shift of form gives the poem moments of focus and brevity, and then moments of expansive breadth and energy, both of which Sandburg wanted to express in his poetry.

Historical Context

The Chicago that Sandburg moved into in 1905 was a prime example of the growing American industrial town that was starting to find out how the economic growth of the late nineteenth century would affect it. Across the nation, improvements in construction, transportation, and communications drew people from the country to great manufacturing cities in the Northeast and Midwest, including Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Cleveland. (After the decline of the manufacturing era, these cities that came to be known as comprising the “Rust Belt” because they were built of steel and were almost obsolete.) Adding to the shift of the U.S. population was the greatest surge in immigration in the history of America. Between 1880 and 1920, for instance, more than 20 million immigrants arrived from Europe. This increase in the labor supply helped with the growth of industry, and large industries attracted people looking for jobs to the cities. There were not, however, enough jobs to absorb all of the workers who arrived, and so the cities were jammed with unemployed people, the high crime rate that accompanies poverty, and the unsanitary conditions that result from overcrowding people into tenements and ghettos. Labor unions, which had existed in America since the middle of the nineteenth century, were regaining the public’s support, and they enjoyed increased negotiating power after 1910, when the flood of cheap labor from immigrants slowed. Workers who were tired of being taken for granted and who were influenced by the political philosophy of Karl Marx joined political parties that vocally and sometimes violently opposed the capitalist structure of government. This atmosphere of poverty, destitution, and social chaos was a breeding ground for crime, and as city government organized so did its evil alter ego, the crime syndicate. In Chicago, organized crime became so prominent in the 1920s that the city became known, even in remote corners of the world, for its criminal activities.

Chicago provided a prime example of the growing pains suffered by major American cities. Its relative newness (although the city had been incorporated in 1835, the famous Chicago fire of 1871 had led to a new beginning), its size, and its extensive immigrant population made it an ideal place for writers to study the phenomenon of modern urban life. For example, Chicago was the home of Hull House, the original prototype of the settlement house. Established in 1889 through the efforts of social reformers, most notably Jane Addams, Hull House provided various forms of support for the city’s underprivileged: it gave housing and financial assistance to the unemployed; it ran special programs for juveniles, to help combat delinquency; it held classes and provided referrals for newly arrived immigrants. With the unending efforts of Ms. Addams, settlement homes modeled on Hull House sprang up around the country in the early decades of this century. She was Hull House’s resident head from its inception in 1889 until her death in 1935, as well as being president of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom from 1919 to 1935, and one of the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920.

Chicago was also a center for the labor movement that was growing both in the nation and around the world. One of history’s most famous confrontations between workers and authorities took place at the McCormick reaper plant in Chicago in 1886. After police tried to break up a protest meeting during the strike, a bomb was thrown into the crowd, killing workers and policemen alike. Eight of the protest’s leaders were arrested, tried, and found guilty, even though the source of the bomb was never identified. Rather than intimidating union organizers, the jailing of the Haymarket protest leaders inspired greater resistance to the government’s unrestrained support of business: to this day, the decision remains a monument

Compare & Contrast

1916: “I believe that the business of neutrality is over,” President Woodrow Wilson said in October. “The nature of modern war leaves no state untouched.” The next year America entered World War I.
1941: Although many European nations were already involved in World War II, the United States did not become involved until U.S. territory at Pearl Harbor was directly attacked.
1991: More than 60 nations from around the world gathered together to oppose Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, a key supplier of the world’s petroleum.
Today: Various regional conflicts around the world bring multinational peacekeeping forces together to help stabilize the situations.
1916: Germany conducted 41 air raids by zeppelin against England, as World War I continued.
Today: American scientist have been working fervently without much success to develop the Star Wars initiative, which is supposed to stop long-range missiles from reaching the United States by shooting them down from space.
1916: The United States Supreme Court upheld laws banning the sale and use of opium products.
Today: After battling the flow of drugs into the country for decades, some social theorists have suggest legalizing the less dangerous ones, ending the profit in criminal trafficking and using the subsequent tax revenues to treat addicts.
1916: An act of Congress created the National Parks Service to preserve millions of acres of forest land for the enjoyment of future generations.
Today: With the population of the United States increasing at an unprecedented rate, the argument between environmentalists who want to preserve forests and developers who think land should be used for industry and construction is becoming increasingly heated.

to suppression of the Constitutional right to free speech. Chicago was also the site of the historic strike against the Pullman company in 1894, which led to a resurgence of union activity in this country. This strike made a national hero of strike organizer Eugene V. Debs, a Chicago labor leader who went on to help organize the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905. A composite of trade unions and socialist groups, the I.W.W. (or “Wobblies”) supported the Marxist theory of struggle between workers and capitalists. In 1897 Debs organized the Social Democratic Party of America. Carl Sandburg met the wife he was married to for 59 years at a Social Democratic party meeting, and his first job in Chicago in 1912 was for The Daily Socialist. Between 1900 and 1920, Eugene Debs unsuccessfully ran for president of the United States five times.

In addition to being a center for the study of urban poverty and for the labor movement, Chicago was also a crime capital in Sandburg’s day. Its reputation was much worse than other large cities, and it became so notorious that in the 1920s the town was synonymous with gangster activity. By 1919, organized crime in Chicago was so powerful that gangsters were able to bribe eight members of the Chicago White Sox baseball team to lose the world series; this was deemed the Black Sox Scandal. At the time, various organized crime syndicates vied for control of gambling and prostitution in Chicago, with the Johnny Terrio gang foremost among them. The image that the city has been known for worldwide, of gangsters with tommy guns killing each other in the streets, started with Prohibition, a ban on liquor that began on midnight, January 16, 1920. A byproduct of this legislated ban was the luring of vicious criminals toward the high profits available from bootlegging (selling illegal liquor). Famed crime figure Al Capone came to Chicago in 1920 and took over control of the Terrio gang in 1925. In 1929 Capone took over all organized crime activity in Chicago by killing off his competition in the legendary St. Valentine’s Day massacre.

Critical Overview

“Chicago,” was possibly Carl Sandburg’s most famous poem. Like much of his other work, its free form, folk subject matter, and depiction of the American landscape and its people, helped, in the words of Herbert Mitgang, “to free poetry from the old strictures.” This style is admittedly similar to that of Walt Whitman. Sandburg presented the tales and talk of the American people, which, according to Daniel Hoffmann, resulted from “his ear for a good yarn, his sense of revealing detail, [and] his empathy for folk wisdom.” This all came together in 1916 in the volume The Chicago Poems. Louis Untermeyer in The Dial described this collection as being “so determined to worship ruggedness that one could hear [Sandburg’s] adjectives strain to achieve a physical strength of their own.” This emphasis on physicality and strength was always a part of Sandburg’s work, as it focused on the people who were the heart of his democratic sensibility.

Sandburg’s popularity and success as a voice for the American people did not go without criticism. Possibly one of the strongest claims made against his poetry came from another revered, distinctly American poet, William Carlos Williams. Although Williams thought “Chicago” to be a “brilliantly successful poem,” he went on to say in his essay “Carl Sandburg’s Complete Poems” that “technically the poems [in the collection] reveal no initiative whatever other than their formlessness; there is no motivating spirit held in the front of the mind to control them.” This leaves the bulk of the poems, Williams then concludes, to be “an aimless series of random and repetitious gestures.” Daniel Hoffmann responded to this criticism by arguing that even if the poems did lack the imaginative, unifying vision of Whitman or Williams, Sandburg still managed to create an individual style, one based, in Hoffmann’s words, “on the faith that poetry is a quality of life itself.”

Criticism

Sean Robisch

Sean Robish holds a Ph.D. in American Literature from Purdue University and has taught composition and literature for eight years. In the essay below, Robisch examines the often contradictory images Sandburg applies to Chicago, complimenting the city’s industry on one hand and criticizing working conditions on the other:

At least one bridge in Illinois has its spans inscribed with lines from Carl Sandburg’s poetry. A good way to read Sandburg is standing in a cornfield with the skyline of Chicago to the north, distant pillars of billowing smokestacks beyond the farms, and finding a line that was painted onto the bridge for a dedication ceremony. The best bridge to choose would be one in disrepair, one replaced by a highway suspension bridge up the river, because Sandburg’s best work masks what appears to be a simple anthem or dedication. Often with great poems the superficial read gives us one message, while re-reading and considering the tangles, the untidiness of verses, may leave us with a touch of suspicion. So, in time, we return to the work, and try to work the knots, to abandon our expectations about neatness, to discover that the poet might have wanted us to grapple with an idea that lesser language would have called a foregone conclusion. This is Sandburg’s expertise, and it is no better articulated than in “Chicago.”

After moving with his wife Lillian (Paula) Steichen and their first child to Chicago, Sandburg worked as a journalist for several newspapers, writing poems all the while and receiving rejection slips, until he composed some “Chicago poems” while working for a trade magazine. Two of the papers that had employed him had socialist political agendas, and Sandburg was a strong proponent of their ideals during the era of American modernism, when populism and socialist activism had great political currency and helped create better working conditions for those under the industrial wheel. Sandburg’s poetry is filled with praise for the laborer; it lacks references to college professors, chief executive officers, or the landed gentry. The poem’s first stanza is written as a formal greeting, ending with a colon, like a letter to the editor. This championship of the blue-collar worker is one of the characteristics which causes critics to compare Sandburg’s work to Walt Whitman’s.

That championship has also often tempted readers to appropriate Sandburg as a champion of

What Do I Read Next?

Nelson Algren was well-known writer among writers, but too few people remember his works today. He wrote about the street life in Chicago that Sandburg praises in this poem, including the workers, the prostitutes, and the small-time crooks. His book Chicago: City on the Make, most recently reprinted in 1983, takes the same stance of pride in corruption and survival that Sandburg took.
To find out what life in Chicago was like for normal people who seldom come in contact with literature, the authoritative source is Studs Turkel’s Division Street: America. Turkel, now in his eighties, is considered the dean of Chicago writers, and his books of interviews with regular people from all walks of life, such as this one, Working, and The Good War, have received international praise and scholarly attention.
The influence of Walt Whitman’s style on this poem is obvious to anyone who has read both poets. Whitman’s finest work is the book Leaves of Grass, which, like “Chicago,” draws our attention to the greatness of common people. Whitman revised the book often over the course of almost forty years, but the 1997 Doubleday edition is safely authoritative, taking most of its poems from the 1892 “deathbed” revision.
To get a sense of how horrible the conditions for workers could be in large cities early in the twentieth century, read Upton Sinclair’s classic, The Jungle. Set among Lithuanian immigrants working at the Chicago stockyards, this 1906 novel is based on an actual 1904 strike at “the yards.” Sinclair’s reputation as a social crusader was built upon this novel and lasted until his death in 1968. This book is continually in print: try to find an edition with the author’s 1946 introduction.

industry. In his book America’s Literary Revolt, Michael Yatron refutes such an position; Sandburg thought the city “a hell-hole, but it is the people of this milieu who are heroic figures—because Sandburg believed in them with mystic faith.” A close look at “Chicago” reveals how the poet may bait us into cheering, then quickly admonish us for too quickly unfurling our flags. The first line is an excellent example of one of the principle devices at work in the poem—the dubious compliment. “Hog Butcher” may be merely a fact of the city’s booming turn-of-the-century slaughterhouse business, but it certainly does not constitute the kind of slogan that would entice people to move to Chicago. And why wouldn’t hog butchery, an occupation employing thousands of workers, be considered an occupation worth compliment? Sandburg immediately responds by dignifying the title with global importance. The city may be a hog butcher, but for the whole world. We see the technique again when the city is addressed as a “Player” with railroads. This indicates power, that Chicago may move railroads around as a child might, “Building, breaking, rebuilding.” Yet “Player” could also be pejorative, implying that a real railroad is hardly a toy, and is too clumsily handled here. In such titles as “Hog Butcher for the World,” and “Player with Railroads” we have the paradigm of the entire poem, the implicit question of whether Sandburg is glorifying the city or insulting it. The blue-collar titles our narrator values beg us to find the humanity in the metropolis.

When Sandburg brought the first set of Chicago poems to Harriet Monroe at Poetry magazine, he probably expected one more rejection. What he received instead was not only publication, but an award for producing the best of the magazine’s poems that year. During those months after the first appearance of his poems, Sandburg received some harsh reviews, particularly from The Dial, a magazine competing with Monroe’s Poetry. The criticism of “Chicago” in particular echoed Monroe’s first reaction, but did not share her deeper considerations. Critics thought the poem to be clumsy, vulgar, metrically inferior and too prosaic. These had been criticisms of Whitman during his time as well, and Monroe, initially startled by such elements in the poem, decided that Sandburg’s work was part of the wake-up call American poetry needed. Monroe became one of the many women in Sandburg’s life who supported his experimentation with identity, language, and presentation, and it was she who introduced him to one of the most important artists’ communities in American history.

Even after Whitman shook up the literary world, poetry was still largely romantic and formalist, controlled by an effete and largely old-guard male constituency. What we now think of as literary modernism would contest that role, freeing poets to pursue inventive forms. Sandburg was hardly the most experimental of the writers to whom Monroe introduced him: they included Ezra Pound, H.D., and Amy Lowell. Any change in Sandburg’s politics or ideals would remain imperceptible throughout his writing life, which was long, and his poetry would eventually be eclipsed by other modernists. But “Chicago” remains one of the great works to connect midwestern urbanism to a broad and complex view of people at work, and was one of the first poems to bring modernism into the national consciousness.

Just as Emerson had called for a national poet to represent an American language and Whitman responded, around the turn of the twentieth century so too did Edward Arlington Robinson and Harriet Monroe call for a poet to contest the conventions of formalism and perpetuate a dynamic language. Sandburg was among the first to respond. Written under the influence of the Native American poetry he had been reading at the time, “Chicago” ironically jolted American formalism with its borrowings from the only truly indigenous literature of the country. He was a multi-faceted writer, not merely a hobbyist in other genres. He won his first Pulitzer Prize not for poetry, but for a six-volume history of Abraham Lincoln that heavily influenced much of his work to follow. He judged Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt along with Clarence Darrow and Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld according to their action on behalf of the oppressed rather than by their party affiliations. Sandburg’s conclusions about leaders, as about cities, were built on what those entitites produced, not in machinery, but in humanity.

Critic Mark Van Doren cited a dark humor as one of Sandburg’s chief poetic virtues, a trait that

“Late in the poem we see the city take a human shape, appearing like a Cheshire cat—the white teeth of a man laughing through smoke and dust. He laughs in ignorance; he has never lost a battle, and this is his greatness, so far his destiny.”

enabled him to see what Thomas Carlyle called “what is beneath him and about him as well as what is above him,” and a trait that separated Sandburg from Whitman. Sandburg used his wit to depict the person who would laugh regally through economic hardship, though that laughter might be grim, even mistaken. In this light, “Chicago” succeeds in avoiding overt propaganda by investing it with clever subtleties, unlike many other Sandburg poems. After casting the city as wicked, crooked, and brutal, and fitting each epithet with journalistically observed examples, the narrator claims the city as his own and returns the skeptic’s sneer. He understands that city loyalists often claim the right to complain: No one may insult my city but me and those who understand it as I do. After assuming this elitist position, the narrator delivers a few more questionable compliments to the city’s greatness. It is a “tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities” only after it has been “flinging magnetic curses,” and “piling job on job.” So the sneer is returned with a wink. If we place ourselves in the position of the personified Chicago, of being addressed in this manner, we may imagine frowning for being called “coarse,” puffing up a little with “strong and cunning,” then scandalized by being called a curse flinger and an oppressor; and just as we are about to respond in self-defense, we’re praised as that “tall bold slugger.” Sandburg keeps Chicago, the recipient of his letter, precariously positioned between the sloganeering of city fathers and the cries for justice of sweatshop workers.

Late in the poem we see the city take a human shape, appearing like a Cheshire cat—the white teeth of a man laughing through smoke and dust. He laughs in ignorance; he has never lost a battle, and this is his greatness, so far his destiny. But destiny is a “terrible burden,” and the implication is that a lost battle is on its way. We must remember, too, that the narrator is still personifying the city, now engendering it as a man. So the repetition of laughter up to the long indentation and exclamation point, becomes almost maniacal or deluded the laughter of the city that thinks it holds power “under his wrist,” or “under his ribs.” But the heart of the people, the poet implies, may not, after all, remain under the wrist, the cage of ribs, or by implication, under the thumb, of the city. So the compliments that close the poem are dubious indeed; they echo the greeting of the letter, but now depict a youth covered in grime, the human being in the midst of all the city’s capitalized titles. Here we see that the greatness of a city is not one-dimensional: at its heart is the person building it. But that person must fight to prevent becoming as “savage” as the city and as ugly as its smoke and dust.

In 1916, the poem appeared as the first in a muscular collection called Chicago Poems, and began Sandburg’s long and prolific career not only as a poet, but as a historian and folklorist as well. In the context of the larger book, the poem takes on a stronger persona than in its 1914 appearance in Poetry. Many of the poems following “Chicago,” such as “They Will Say,” are much more clear about the narrator’s harsh reaction to urban hardship. Amy Lowell pointed out the subtle turns from brutality to tenderness, and critic William Alexander posits that the presence of tenderness throughout the collection of poems is often reserved for the lake, the pastoral outside the city and away from the urban poor. Strikes and riots were frequent in Chicago during the early modern era, and Sandburg continued to view them both with the journalist’s eye and the poet’s language. He understood how to meld these worlds, having been a manual laborer through his twenties, a journalist into his thirties, and a poet all his life.

As a child, Sandburg had signed his name “Charles A. Sandburg” because it sounded more American, to which his parents responded with understanding and gave Carl the nickname “Cully.” He wrote under psuedonyms when working for papers whose ideals he could not support, and when he finally established himself as a poet, did so as “Carl,” a child of a hard-working Swedish immigrant family. His struggle for identity was not only as a poet, but as a socialist, a presidential historian, a collector of American folk songs, and as a Swedish-American, a war correspondent in Stockholm who was later honored by that nation as well as the United States. Even The Dial eventually published some of his work, acknowledging that his poetry deserved a public forum. Sandburg’s identity began to solidify with the publication of Chicago Poems and gave American poetry a purveyor of the human landscape, a new poet for the people.

Source: Sean Robisch, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1998.

Chris Semansky

Chris Semansky is a freelance writer, teacher, and sole proprietor of Apocalypse Joe’s, a merchandising firm specializing in millennial kitsch. In the following essay, Semansky examines how the poem’s narrative voice, the use of personification, and the “manner of presentation” illustrate the “confidence and recklessness” of Chicago.

To personify something is to make it human and to speak or to write about it as if it were an animate being. We hear this everyday when people refer to the planet we live on as “mother earth” or when journalists write that the stock market has been “stingy” or “generous.” Personifying an idea or an object makes it easier for readers to visualize it in more concrete terms and to develop emotional responses to it. To use personification successfully a poem needs to produce an image in the reader’s mind that makes sense and also forges a connection between the thing or concept being personified and the human characteristic linked to the inanimate object. Carl Sandburg uses personification in his well-known poem, “Chicago,” where the relationship between the object—in this case the city—and the means of personification is more complex and difficult to visualize. In this poem, the poet describes the city as a volatile and energetic working-class man full of machismo.

In the short first section of the poem, Sandburg lists not only the industries the city is known for but also describes how a person possessing similar traits might look and behave, creating an image of a strong, working-class man:

Hog butcher of the world,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight
       Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the big shoulders.

While it is true, as Sandburg critic Philip Yan nella suggests in The Other Carl Sandburg, that the opening “sounds like a chamber of commerce blurb [whose] capitalized words suggest the advertiser’s craft,” the portrait Sandburg presents also depicts the city as a bad boy. The narrator, assuming the role of parent, dismisses complaints that his city child is “wicked,” “crooked,” and “brutal,” replying in turn: “I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city / and I give them back the sneer.” Complaints of the city’s “immoral” nature were common during the early twentieth century in Chicago, where social reformers, anti-urban crusaders, and temperance groups battled forces of modernization and industrialization. Defiantly—again reminiscent of a parent who recognizes his son’s faults yet remains obstinately proud of him—Sandburg’s narrator refuses to renounce his city-child. “Come and show me another city and lifted head singing so proud to be alive,” he says, echoing the cockiness of his own offspring. It is the narrator’s own aggressive yet forgiving attitude toward the city that provides the poem with so much of its energy.

Sandburg expresses the city’s hyper-masculine, arrogant energy in his personification of the city, describing it as alternately “a bold slugger”; “a savage pitted against the wilderness”; or “an ignorant fighter who has never lost a battle.” Chicago is depicted not so much a city as it a testosterone-laden, 18-year-old who lives purely on instinct. By juxtaposing images of poverty and corruption with the “bragging and laughing” behavior of the personified city, Sandburg intentionally brings to the forefront the effects of a capitalist economy on the working class. An ardent socialist keenly aware of the inequalities to which unfettered capitalism leads, Sandburg recognized that the city was a place of both hope and despair for many in early twentieth-century America. While farmers and the rural poor flocked to Chicago and other large cities seeking better jobs and opportunities, they often ended up broke and worse off than when they arrived—victims of hustlers, low-wage jobs, and their own unrealistic expectations. Harry Golden, a journalist and Sandburg scholar, observed in his book Carl Sandburg that “while the city is a bold enterprise on the part of men, it is also an enterprise which corrupts natural emotions.” These natural emotions include the trust and goodwill that many men and women have toward one another.

Yannella connects Sandburg’s politics more directly to the poem’s central idea, saying that “Thematically, ‘Chicago’ was an orthodox radical statement about labor as the creator of wealth.”

“The poet describes the city as a volatile and energetic working-class man full of machismo.”

Finding the material origin of Sandburg’s personified city in images of the proletariat hero, Yannella claims in The Other Carl Sandburg that:

Visually, Sandburg’s myth-man was a perfect replica of the Adam-like American worker depicted in cartoon and poster art in left-leaning magazines and union propaganda. Sometimes, looming heroically above industrial landscapes, this familiar figure—powerfully muscled, square-jawed, grinning or looking resolute—was shown already victorious over his circumstances. Other versions stressed the potential of victory, with the worker tensed to catapult into a future beyond wage slavery, his broken chains dangling from his powerful wrists.

Sandburg displays the confidence and recklessness of Chicago in the construction of the poem as well. By this I mean that his method of presenting his ideas and the ideas themselves dovetail. Not only does Sandburg write about the city of Chicago as a vibrant, relentlessly active, innately amoral place of embodied contradictions, but he writes about the city in a manner that celebrates and embraces these very attributes. His use of short and long stanzas, his choppy sentences and anarchic prose rhythms, and his use of slang and colloquialisms underscore the theme of the poem: that Chicago cannot be tamed because it embodies the life force itself. In this way we can say that the form (manner of presentation) of Sandburg’s poem cannot be divorced from its content (ideas). “The aim [of Chicago Poems]” Sandburg himself said, “was to sing, blab, chortle, yodel, like people, and people in the sense of human beings subtracted from formal doctrine,” according to a 1978 New Republic article by Mitgang Herbert. Donald Barlow Stauffer echoes this sentiment in his own response to Chicago Poems (in A Short History of American Poetry), saying that Sandburg demonstrates “a sure and strong voice, with a deep underlying love of people; people in the abstract, but seen in individuals, in particulars.” Calling him “the poet of social consciousness” Stauffer applauded Sandburg for being “the champion of the little guy and the underdog, the fellow who never had a chance.”

Such an approach to poetry offended many readers who were accustomed to “loftier” subject matter, more refined language, and nuanced metaphors in their verse. Sandburg biographer North Callahan wrote in Carl Sandburg that the poet’s use of slang and the earthy idiom of the common man “outraged” readers. His poetry astonished them. “It was verse of massive gait,” Poetry editor Harriet Monroe said, “whether you call it poetry or not.” Some critics suggested that Sandburg’s writing didn’t constitute poetry but was closer to the “ill-regulated speech” of Walt Whitman. Indeed, Sandburg’s colloquialisms, his use of compound descriptions, his long awkward lines, and his praise of the common working man in his Chicago poems mark him as a poetic heir of Whitman and to Whitman’s vision of America. Roger Mitchell wrote in his essay “Modernism Comes To American Poetry,” “The lines [of “Chicago”] are not without strength, and Sandburg was one of the first after Whitman to catch in poetry, something of the brute reality of the emerging American City. But, typical of Sandburg, the poem reflects Whitman’s wordiness without his sensitivity to the delicately exact image, Whitman’s uncoiling line without his grace of movement.” “Sensitivity to the delicately exact image,” however, is precisely a feature of a poetic tradition that did not interest Sandburg, who was more drawn to the raw language of the working class and who was interested in speaking for those who couldn’t speak for themselves precisely because they didn’t possess the “delicately exact image.” This included the city of Chicago itself. His distinctly rough, male voice was also a response to the other modernist tradition that Mitchell deemed “urban and international, aesthetically intricate, politically and socially conservative, and difficult to grasp.” According to Mitchell, Sandburg wanted to rescue poetry “from its reputation, cultivated and flaunted by the English Aesthetes and Decadents, as effete and unmasculine.”

By ending the poem with the same words with which it began, Sandburg underscores the idea that Chicago is a process, not a product—that finally it exceeds even our own understanding and his own descriptions. Like human beings, cities have cycles, their own ups and downs, virtues and vices; also like human beings, they often contain irreconcilable contradictions. We may not necessarily “understand” the city of Chicago at the end of the poem, but we do understand Sandburg’s own unabashed love for its vitality and the resilience and often unconquerable will of its people.

Source: Chris Semansky, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1998.

Daniel Hoffman

In the following excerpt, Hoffman maintains that the strength of Sandburgs’s poems, which “celebrate the infinite variety of American life,” comes not from Sandburg’s craft but from his colorful subject matter.

Mark Van Doren, speaking in The Library of Congress shortly after [Carl] Sandburg’s death, said of his life of Lincoln that “It may even be Sandburg’s greatest poem, if our definition of poetry is liberal enough to include it.” Such praise can be given to nearly all of Sandburg’s prose—his autobiography, his children’s stories. We say this of course because Carl Sandburg was a poet first; from his earliest book, Chicago Poems in 1916, it was as a poet that he was regarded, and as a poet that he regarded himself. On this hundredth anniversary of his birth is seems appropriate to take a retrospective look at Sandburg’s achievement. It is my hope to present his work in a way that makes possible a fair revaluation of the writings of this attractive, generous, likeable man who pitched his verses to a scale of possibilities so different from those of his contemporaries or successors.…

If completion of his first century qualifies a departed poet for a celebration among the shades, then somewhere on or near Olympus there must be tonight a gathering like this one, with the ghost of Sandburg himself at its center, singing “The Boll Weevil” or “The Streets of Laredo” to his guitar, and saying his poems in that voice at once warm and rough. He’d be in workman’s clothes, and have his audience in the palm of his ghostly hand. For Sandburg was the Will Rogers of the poetry circuit, a masterful entertainer. Only Robert Frost could rival him in this. He brought a sense of color, of liveliness, of beauty in their own lives to many who don’t read other poets at all. His poems came as near to being prose as they can, and yet they are poetry. There’s little in Sandburg of the virtues most readers value in the poems of his contemporaries. Most recent critics and scholars of modern verse have had other fish to fry, and have passed Sandburg by. Not that he didn’t get lots of praise in his time, but it was more often from those who prized the life his work reflects than from those whose chief concerns were with the art of poetry.…

I assume that everyone at all familiar with Sandburg knows his most famous poem, the one that begins

HOG Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight
       Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders …

This poem, perhaps overly famous, has become a sort of albatross to Sandburg’s reputation. He was capable of many other notes than “Stormy, husky, brawling,” but they may be drowned out in the memories of everyone who has read “Chicago.” One such note is joyousness in the most ordinary life, in sights other poets had not noticed, sounds made by people other poets hadn’t listened to, as in “The Shovel Man”.…

This is perhaps the first poem in American literature in which an Italian immigrant is presented as a serious subject; until Sandburg’s Chicago Poems appeared, the immigrant was to be found only as a comic stereotype, speaking in the dialect poems of T. A. Daly. Writing at the time not only of the free-verse movement in poetry, but also when the Armory Show had dramatized the new, democratic aesthetic of the Ash Can school in painting, Sandburg too could look up and down a teeming street of city tenements and find subjects whose innate beauty and joy in life invited treatment in his art.…

[“The Shovel Man” and “Fish Crier”] are but two from Sandburg’s scores of poems that describe and celebrate the infinite variety of American life. The first fact one confronts in reading Sandburg is his inclusiveness, his liberality. Although many of his poems are brief—I believe the best ones to be so—the sensibility of the poet embodies what Whitman once called “acceptation.” Sandburg excludes nothing, or at any rate very little, of his own experience from his poetry. If what he sees on a crowded city street on a wintry day includes a fish peddler, his poem will tell us this, and will tell us what feelings the sight of that peddler evokes in him.

Sandburg touches many emotions as well as observing facts and faces. Alongside his celebrations of the various fulfilments of human life are his moments of poignance, of longing, as in “Gone”.…

So much has been said about Sandburg’s vitality and his celebration of life that his ability to see sharply the darker side of life—its doubts, its defeats, its despairs—is often overlooked. Yet these too are among the emotions his poems keenly define.…

“[Sandburg’s] purpose would be to take poetry out of the parlor and clothe it in overalls.…”

His rejection of meters and rhymes made possible Sandburg’s style, but what made possible his rejections? It’s not only that he lived through the vers libre period; after all, by the time free verse came along Carl Sandburg was in his thirties. It was in search of hints of what made his style possible that I recently read his autobiography, Always the Young Stranger(1953).

This book re-creates the first twenty years of a fellow who didn’t yet know where he was going in life or what he would become. Luckily, Sandburg had a memory as retentive as flypaper, and he recollected details like a magpie hoarding spoons. His account is perhaps overfull, even garrulous, but it is richly informative and steeped with affection for the small town on the prairies that was the young Sandburg’s entire world. To help out his family and, later, to strike out on his own, Sandburg worked successively as milk delivery driver, barber-shop attendant, tinsmith, bottle-washer, potter, and many another odd job until he left town to ride the rails and sleep in hobo camps around the country. He returned to enlist in the Illinois Volunteers in 1898 and served in Puerto Rico.

To this observant boy, Galesburg was a miniature of the country at large. Its population ranged from hoboes and drunks to the boss of the State Republican Party and the United States Ambassador to Denmark. There were immigrants like the Sandburgs and their Polish, Hungarian, German Jewish, Irish, and Italian neighbors among the older Anglo-American stock and blacks. In one chapter Sandburg tells of a settler whose plough broke the plains when Galesburg was founded only fifty years before his own birth, and of another neighbor who invented a mechanical cornplanter, production of which became the town’s principal industry. These two overlapping lives take the history of the country from the frontier into the industrial era.

This town of 20,000 had its honky-tonks, its red-light district, its railroad yards and feed stores, its shacks and its mansions. Across Berrien Street from the Sandburgs, young Charlie, as he was then called, would see a neighbor milk his cow every morning, then get up from the milking stool and walk a few hundred yards to meet his classes at Lombard College. Knox College, better known, was in Galesburg too, and still is there. By the time he was twenty Sandburg had learned a lot of American life through living it to the full in Galesburg. His book about that life bears comparison with Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, with Peck’s Bad Boy, with the first volume of W. D. Howell’s autobiography. Always the Young Strangers is one of the best books about small town American boyhood that we have.

But where in all this experience are the sources of Sandburg’s style in his poetry? One must begin with the fact that Sandburg was indeed of the salt of the earth. His father and mother were immigrants from Sweden, and of all American poets of stature, Sandburg is the only one I know for whom English was not the language of family life, of home, of his own tradition. The one book his father read was the Swedish Bible. Sandburg attended public schools through the eighth grade, but seems not to have absorbed the poets in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. He seems never to have had to memorize passages from The Vision of Sir Launfall, or Hiawatha, or “Thanatopsis,” or “The Deacon’s One Horse Shay.” Or if he did, they did not impress him. Sandburg grew up unexposed or immune to the pieties of the Anglo-American poetry tradition. It was there, in the books, but it didn’t have to do with him. And how could it have, for what he would have in his mind to express when the time came were things none of the poets in Palgrave, none of the bearded bards on the schoolroom wall, had ever touched. His purpose would be to take poetry out of the parlor and clothe it in overalls.…

Sandburg did not encounter literature until, after service in the Army, he enrolled as a special student at Lombard College. There a teacher of unusual intellectual power and literary sensitivity befriended and guided him. It is an overstatement to say that Sandburg lacked cultivation or was ignorant of the literary traditions he did not use in his poems. He became in fact a reader who, with the pertinacity of one who gets a late start, devoured books of all kinds. But the mould had been set: Sandburg to the end was a writer who prized direct experience over literary tradition, raw power over finesse. He was a writer who evolved his own cadences pragmatically, whose sense of rudimentary poetic structure reflects his adaptation of folksong and ballad, and whose vignettes in free verse recall the brevity of feature articles in a daily paper. For it was as a journalist that Sandburg schooled himself to write and this was how he made his living until the first volume of his Lincoln, researched and written under these conditions, brought him security.

It is often said that Whitman is Sandburg’s model, even that Sandburg is Whitman’s successor. Surely he learned from Whitman the possibilities of a long prose-rhythmed strophe. And just as surely he learned even more from the Bible, where Whitman learned it, of the uses of incremental repetition. But anyone leafing through Sandburg’s Collected Poems may be surprised at how often he used short lines, a different swing altogether from Whitman’s lyrical legato. True Whitman preceded him in glorifying the details of the common life; but I agree with Professor Gay Wilson Allen that Sandburg’s divergences from Whitman are greater than his resemblances. Chief of these divergences is in these poets’ attitude toward death. Sandburg has little of Whitman’s welcoming of death as the unifier and completion of life; for Sandburg death is merely life’s end, not its fulfilment. Death is central to Whitman’s work, the deep dark river that flows through all of his lines, while Sandburg is a poet of living. His vision of life does not include tragedy.

Impatient of theory, Sandburg in the preface to his Collected Poems tells us that “the more rhyme there is in poetry the more danger of its tricking the writer into something other than the urge [he had] in the beginning.” As Mark Van Doren justly said of him, “He feels free only when he thinks he has escaped from form. He seems to have known nothing about the freedom that flows from mastery of form.” Yet at his best Sandburg contrived his own form—without apparently being aware of it as form at all. He regarded his free verse as entirely free. The question his readers ultimately have to face, because the experience of reading more than a few anthology pieces by any poet raises it, is whether the structures as well as the language Carl Sandburg devised to take the place of those he spurned have the look and the feel of necessity. As the pioneers of the prairies knew, it takes more than sod to build sod houses. There must be a rudimentary architecture to hold up the roof, keep the doors and windows hung squarely on their sills, let the smoke go up the chimney. This principle is equally true of those other indigenous structures, the skyscrapers, which Sandburg was among the first to praise in his poems.

As a preface to his volume Good Morning, America (1928), Sandburg offered “Tentative (First Model) Definitions of Poetry”; from those we may infer his convictions about the nature of poetry itself. Where Archibald MacLeish, in his familiar “Ars Poetica,” offered only three such definitions, Sandburg with typical prodigality sets down thirty eight. It is hard to find any thread of connection or development among them, but on inspection his definitions prove to be of three sorts. On the one hand there are these:

5. Poetry is a sequence of dots and dashes, spelling depths, crypts, cross-lights, and moon wisps.
9. Poetry is an echo asking a shadow dancer to be a partner.
37. Poetry is a mystic, sensuous mathematics of fire, smokestacks, waffles, pansies, people, and purple sunsets.

These strophes are simple imagism gone to seed with sentimentality. But strewn among them are definitions in which the given images dramatize a state of feeling:

7. Poetry is a plan for a slit in the face of a bronze fountain goat and the path of fresh drinking water.
10. Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly the air.
32. Poetry is a shuffling of boxes of illusions buckled with a strap of facts.

And there are also definitions which offer a sense not only of the effects of poetry on the reader but of the means of creating those effects:

1. Poetry is a projection across silence of cadences arranged to break that silence with definite intentions of echoes syllables, wave lengths.
3. Poetry is the report of a nuance between two moments, when people say, ‘Listen!’ and ‘Did you see it?’ ‘Did you hear it,’ ‘What was it?’
38. Poetry is the capture of a picture, a song, or a flab, in a deliberate prism of words.

Yet compared to the metapoetics of Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, or Marianne Moore, these definitions seem impressionistic rather than analytical. Sandburg is concerned with the effects and materials of his poetry but not with creating those effects from new modes of perception. He would, as he says in yet another definition, “achieve a synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits,”—or of moonlight and mittens—simply by juxtaposing the one with the other. And yet we know that his practice is a little more uncasual than his protestations. His best poems, and the best passages in his longer, uneven poems, are shaped with a kind of caring of his own.

The case against Sandburg was made by William Carlos Williams, reviewing the Collected

“Sandburg to the end was a writer who prized direct experience over literary tradition, raw power over finesse.”

Poems in Poetry (September 1951). Williams’ review states the reasons for that neglect of Sandburg by critics, scholars, and most other poets against which Roy Basler (in The Muse and the Librarian, 1974) and his other defenders have protested. Williams faulted Sandburg for having no development in his work. Sandburg, said Williams, “although the best of him was touched with fire,” made the “mistake of trying to substitute the materials of a new territory for the great and universal power of art itself.… The formlessness of his literary figures was the very formlessness of the materials with which he worked.… He didn’t see that the terms the people use are so often the very thing that defeats them. It is by his invention of new terms that the artist uniquely serves.”

One can see why Karl Shapiro, then editor of Poetry, chose Dr. Williams to review Carl Sandburg’s work. For Williams was the one poet of their generation most like Sandburg in his use of the industrial landscape of contemporary life, and the one most determined to discover in his experiences their own principle of form. And for Williams it is here that Sandburg is fatally deficient: lacking a theory of poetry, he has no formal principle to make his poetry cohere. The charge is a grave one, from which Sandburg’s reputation suffers still.…

But Dr. Williams’ objections cannot be completely obviated. Here, as everywhere, he would say, Sandburg accepted that which is, while it is demanded of a great poet that he impose upon reality his own imaginative vision. Such is the unification of experience we find in Whitman, in Emily Dickinson; such is what Williams, Pound, Eliot, Stevens, and Frost each in his own way strove for.

I find something like this in Sandburg too, though not as powerfully crafted as in these other poets. What I find as the unification of his vision is in fact inherent in the very amplitude, vitality, and inclusiveness with which Sandburg’s work spreads itself before us. We must accept the seeming artlessness of his diction, the sprawl of his forms, and the fact that the tensile strength of his individual lines is seldom taut, as we expect great verse to be. Yet his ear, his tone, his lilt, his voice are unmistakable. Out of what Williams termed his weaknesses Sandburg made an individual style. His work is based on the faith that poetry is a quality of life itself. It is easy to oversimplify Sandburg’s view of “the people”; sometimes he oversimplified it himself. And it is easy to dismiss his conviction that in the demotic diction of American life there is a vein of real poetry; he himself often quarried more dross than the genuine article. But Sandburg’s conviction that the real thing was there, that he could find and shape it into poetry, is not a mere submission to whatever is. It is this conviction that I take to be Sandburg’s democratic ideal, his insistence that the lives and lingo of blue-collar people could bring him not only the subjects of art but the materials of art, and that from these he could make poetry.

Much of his work is flawed, but in at least two periods of his long career he achieved a democratic art that lasts. Sandburg’s best poems still speak of lives of people in small towns, in city ghettoes, and of the energy and broken patterns of industrial life with the force, the clarity, and the pleasure that first was found in them. And the poetic vision in The People, Yes is felt, not in the invention of a new language or a novel presentation for poetry, but in the poet’s faith that “the bookless people” could, in their adversity, provide a thesaurus of idioms commensurate with their strength to endure and their will to survive.

Like the men who broke the plains in Illinois, Carl Sandburg was a pioneer. His vision of life was neither tragic nor cheery, but inclusive of defeat, of doubt, of despair even; these conditions he found life to transcend by its own resilience. He was deeply in the American grain in his pragmatism, his hopefulness. He once said, “The past is a bucket of ashes.” He wrote of the present he knew. Now that that present and his work have become parts of our past, we can look back at Sandburg’s best poems with gratitude for their capturing a portion of the reality of his time. We can thank Sandburg, too, for enlarging the possibilities of subject and language for other poets who came in our century.

Source: “‘Moonlight dries no mittens’: Carl Sandburg Reconsidered” in The Georgia Review, Vol. XXXII, No. 2, summer 1978, pp. 390-406.

Sources

Alexander, William, “The Limited American, the Great Loneliness, and the Singing Fire: Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems,” in American Literature, Vol. 45, No. 1, March, 1973, pp. 63-83.

Brumm, Anne-Marie, “The Cycle of Life: Motifs in the Chicago Poems of Carl Sandburg,” in Zeitschrift fur Anglistik und Amerikanstik, Vol. 31, No. 3, 1983, pp. 237-55.

Callahan, North, Carl Sandburg, College Station, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996.

Crowder, Richard, “The Lure of the Big City,” in Carl Sandburg, New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1964.

Furer, Howard B., editor, Chicago: A Chronological History, Dobbs Ferry, NY: Oceana Publications, 1974.

Golden, Harry, Carl Sandburg, NY: The World Publishing Company, 1961.

Hacker, Jeffrey H., Carl Sandburg, New York: Franklin Watts, 1984.

Hoffmann, Daniel, “‘Moonlight Dries No Mittens’: Carl Sandburg Reconsidered,” The Georgia Review, Vol. XXXII, No. 2, Summer, 1978, pp. 390-407.

Mitchell, Roger, “Modernism Comes To American Poetry,” in In A Profile of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, edited by Jack Myers and David Wojahn, Carbondale, II: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992, pp. 25-54.

Mitgang, Herbert, “Carl Sandburg,” The New Republic, Vol. 178, No. 2, January 14, 1978, pp. 24-6.

Niven, Penelope, Carl Sandburg: A Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1991.

Reid, Robert L., “The Day Book Poems of Carl Sandburg,” in The Old Northwest: A Journal of Regional Life & Letters, Vol. 9, No. 3, Fall, 1983, pp. 205-18.

Sandburg, Carl, Complete Poems, Harcourt, Brace, & Company, 1950.

Stauffer, Donald Barlow, A Short History of American Poetry, New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1974.

Untermeyer, Louis, “Strong Timber,” The Dial, Vol. XLV, No. 774, October 5, 1918, pp. 263-64.

Van Doren, Mark, introduction to Carl Sandburg’s Harvest Poems: 1910-1960, Harcourt, Brace, & Company, Inc., 1960, pp. 5-10.

Williams, William Carlos, “Carl Sandburg’s Complete Poems,” Poetry, LXXVIII, No. 6, September, 1951.

Yannella, Philip, The Other Carl Sandburg, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1995.

Yatron, Michael, America’s Literary Revolt, Philosophical Library, Inc., 1959.

For Further Study

Andrews, Clarence A., Chicago in Story: A Literary History, Iowa City, IA: Midwest Heritage Publishing Co., 1982.

This book gives a comprehensive overview of works written about Chicago and things that have been written about the city.

Callahan, North, Carl Sandburg: His Life and Works, University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1987.

This scholarly extended biography gives a concise history of Sandburg’s life and works.

Miller, Donald L., City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.

The century referred to in the title is the nineteenth, but this book is very useful and interesting to anyone who is trying to understand any big American city at the time Sandburg was writing.

Wilson, Gay Allen, Carl Sandburg, University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers No. 101, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1972.