3. Carl Sandburg was an American poet,
biographer, novelist, journalist, songwriter,
editor, and author of children's books.
Born Carl August Sandburg, in 1878 to
Swedish immigrants August and Clara
Anderson Sandburg, in Galesburg, Illinois,
the second of seven children.
He was forced to leave school at age thirteen
to help supplement the family income, and
spent a decade working a variety of jobs.
4. He delivered milk, laid bricks, threshed
wheat in Kansas, and shined shoes in
Galesburg's Union Hotel before traveling as
a hobo in 1897.
His experiences working and traveling
greatly influenced his writing and political
views.
He saw first-hand the sharp contrast
between rich and poor, a dichotomy that
instilled in him a distrust of capitalism.
5.
6. After spending three and a half months traveling
through Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, and Colorado on
the railroad, Sandburg volunteered for service in
the Spanish-American War in 1898, and served in
Puerto Rico.
As a returning veteran he was offered free tuition
at Lombard College in Galesburg, which he
accepted.
At the college he joined the Poor Writers' Club, an
informal literary organization whose members
met to read and criticize poetry.
7. He studied there for four years but left in
1902 before graduating. It was at Lombard
that Sandburg began to develop his talents
for writing, encouraged by the scholar Philip
Green Wright.
On a small hand press in the basement of his
home, Wright set the type for Sandburg's first
publications: In Reckless Ecstasy (1904),
Incidentals (1905), The Plaint of a Rose
(1905), and Joseffy (1906).
8. During that time Sandburg grew increasingly
concerned with the plight of the American
workers.
In 1907 he worked as an organizer for the
Wisconsin Social Democratic party, writing
and distributing political pamphlets and
literature.
At party headquarters in Milwaukee,
Sandburg met Lilian Steichen, whom he
married in 1908.
9. First in Wisconsin and later in Chicago,
Sandburg worked as a reporter for a number
of newspapers, including the Milwaukee Daily
News and later the small, left-wing Day Book,
in which appeared a handful of his early
poems.
Sandburg soon gained recognition when
Harriet Monroe, editor of the progressive
literary periodical, Poetry: A Magazine of
Verse, published six of his poems in 1914.
10. During this time Sandburg cultivated a
number of literary friendships and later
gained the attention of Henry Holt and
Company, the firm that was to publish his
first significant volume of poetry, Chicago
Poems (1916).
This work and the five collections that
succeeded it over the course of the following
two decades contributed to Sandburg's rise to
popular esteem, making him one of the most
recognized American poets of the first half of
the twentieth century.
11. Apart from his poems, Sandburg was also
known for his fanciful children's tales,
Rootabaga Stories (1922). The book
prompted Sandburg's publisher, Alfred
Harcourt, to suggest a biography of Abraham
Lincoln for children.
Sandburg researched and wrote for three
years, producing not a children's book, but a
two-volume biography for adults.
His Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years,
published in 1926, was Sandburg's first
financial success.
12. He devoted the next several years to
completing four additional volumes, Abraham
Lincoln: The War Years, for which he won the
Pulitzer Prize in 1940.
Sandburg continued his prolific writing,
publishing more poems, a novel,
Remembrance Rock (1948), a second volume
of folk songs, an autobiography, Always the
Young Strangers (1953)
Sandburg's Complete Poems won him a
second Pulitzer Prize in 1951.
13. Sandburg was an eminent figure of the
―Chicago Renaissance‖ and the era
encompassing World War I and the Great
Depression.
On its initial publication in 1916, his Chicago
Poems was greeted with mixed reaction, with
many reviewers finding its subject matter
startling and its prosaic poetry oddly
structured.
Nevertheless, the volume proved a career-
making event and is generally regarded as one
of Sandburg's finest poetic achievements.
14. ―The free rhythm of Mr. Carl Sandburg are a fine
achievement in poetry. No one who reads Chicago
Poems with rhythm particularly in mind can fail to
recognize how much beauty he attains in this
regard.‖ (Francis Hackett. Horizons (Huebsch-
Viking), 1918.
―Buried deep within the He man, the hairy, meat
eating Sandburg, there is another Sandburg, a
sensitive, naïve, hesitating Carl Sandburg, a
Sandburg that hears the voice of the wind over
roofs of house at night, a Sandburg that wanders
often alone through grim city street on winter
nights, a Sandburg that knows and understands
the voiceless cry in the heart of the farm girl of
the plains when she comes to the kitchen door
and sees for the first time the beauty of prairie
country…‖ –Sherwood Anderson, Bookman, 1921.
15. By mid-century his folksy and regional
approach was overshadowed by the allusive
and cerebral verse of such poets as Ezra
Pound and T. S. Eliot.
While Sandburg continued to depict ordinary
people in their everyday settings, other poets
were gaining critical acclaim for internalizing
and codifying experiences.
Despite the fact that it was honored with a
Pulitzer Prize in 1951, Sandburg's Complete
Poems elicited little more than brief
commentary on the occasion of its
publication; few took the opportunity to
evaluate the whole of Sandburg's poetic
career.
18. In order to comprehend more of Sandburg’s
works in Chicago Poems, it is helpful to also
know Chicago from its historical perspective.
Chicago was incorporated as a town in 1837.
As the site of the Chicago Portage, the city
emerged as an important transportation hub
between the eastern and western United
States.
19. Chicago's first railway, Galena and Chicago
Union Railroad, opened in 1848, which also
marked the opening of the Illinois and
Michigan Canal. The canal allowed
steamboats and sailing ships on the Great
Lakes to connect to the Mississippi River.
The first station at Wells Street was built by the Galena and
Chicago Union Railroad, the first railroad in Chicago, opened
in 1848.
21. River steamers at Pittsburg, with coal barges for the
Mississippi river - this shows a peculiar American
type of steamboat, the sternwheeler, specially
serviceable for navigating shallow rivers.
22. A flourishing economy brought residents from
rural communities and immigrants abroad to
Chicago and Midwestern cities.
Manufacturing and retail sectors became
dominant among Midwestern cities, influencing
the American economy, particularly in
meatpacking, with the advent of the
refrigerated rail car and the regional centrality
of the city's Union Stock Yards.
Refrigerated Car,
Illinois, 1893
23. In the 1850s Chicago gained national political
prominence as the home of Senator Stephen
Douglas, the champion of the Kansas-
Nebraska Act and "popular sovereignty"
approach to the issue of the spread of
slavery.
These issues also helped propel another
Illinoisan, Abraham Lincoln, to the national
stage. Lincoln was nominated in Chicago for
the nation's presidency at the 1860
Republican National Convention and went on
to defeat Douglas in the general election,
setting the stage for the American Civil War
which was declared in April,1861.
24. After the Great Chicago Fire of 1871
destroyed a third of the city, including the
entire central business district, Chicago
experienced rapid rebuilding and growth.
The Great Chicago Fire,
1871
25. Montauk Building was built in 1882 in
Chicago and demolished in 1902; it was
the first building to be called a
―skyscraper‖
During its rebuilding
period, Chicago
constructed the world's
first skyscraper in
1882, using steel-
skeleton construction.
26. During this time huge numbers of new
immigrants from Europe and from the
eastern states migrated to Chicago.
Of the total population in 1900 not less than
77.4% were foreign-born, or born in the
United States of foreign parentage. Germans,
Irish, Poles, Swedes and Czechs made up
nearly two-thirds of the foreign-born
population.
In 1900, whites were 98.1% of the city's
population.
27. The 1920s also saw a major expansion in
industry. The availability of jobs attracted
blacks from the South. Between 1910 and
1930, the black population of Chicago
dramatically increased from 44,103 to
233,903.
Arriving in the hundreds of thousands during
the Great Migration, the newcomers had an
immense cultural impact. It was during this
wave that Chicago became a center for jazz,
with King Oliver leading the way.
29. By 1910 railroad cars were hauling 95% of the freight
handlers through the city, and 1,300 passenger trains
carried 175,000 people in and out Chicago every day.
The Loop elevated tracks, around 1900
30. ―MAMIE beat her head against the bars of a little Indiana
town and dreamed of romance and big things off
somewhere the way the railroad trains all ran.
She could see the smoke of the engines get lost down
where the streaks of steel flashed in the sun and
when the newspapers came in on the morning mail
she knew there was a big Chicago far off, where all
the trains ran…‖
Carl Sandburg, Chicago Poems
31. The Court of Honor, Chicago’s Word Fair,1893, its
White City with the Court of Honor inspired many
city planning projects nationwide.
32. The Court of Honor of the World’s Columbian Exhibition, 1893
33. The picture of the Ferris Wheel at the 1893 Chicago World Fair
21st Chicago
34. The Chicago Board of Trade,
established in 1848.
Chicago Board of
Trade, 21st Century
35. The trading room of the
Board of Trade, 1903
Trade floor of the Board of
Trade, 21st century
39. The Garment Workers
Strike, in Chicago, 1915
In 1910 and 1915, tens
of thousands of Chicago
garment workers, many
of them young
immigrant women, took
to the streets to protest
their working conditions.
41. ―We struck the home-trail now, and in a few
hours were in that astonishing Chicago—a city
where there always rubbing the lamp, and
fetching up the genii, and contriving and
achieving new impossibilities. It is hopeless for
the occasional visitor to try to keep up with
Chicago—she outgrows his prophecies faster
than he can make them. She is always a
novelty; for she is never the Chicago you saw
when you passed through the last time.‖
Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (1883)
42.
43. Chicago Poems, with its humanistic rendering
of urban life, place descriptions and a
collection of character sketches, provides a
stark but idealized view of the working class.
Drawing from his working class roots,
Sandburg builds a raw-boned poetry that
violates the poetic norms of the time -- he
casts off inherited poetic diction and form
and adopts an exuberant free verse.
44. Sandburg does not like to experiment with
complicated syntax and images, but rather
prefers to give the reader something concrete
and direct.
―Chicago,‖ the centerpiece of the work and
one of Sandburg's most celebrated poems,
not only portrays the faults of the Midwestern
metropolis but also praises what Sandburg
considered the joy and vitality integral to life
there.
45. CHICAGO
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;
46. CHICAGO
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;
47. 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.
48. In the first five lines, Sandburg addresses Chicago
in a series of brief epithets which characterize the
urbanized city:
―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:”
These powerful lines leave readers with a vivid
picture of an industrial city with its severe life,
yet proud people.
49. In celebrating slaughterhouses, the famous
opening lines also establish the violent energy
of Chicago - the city's creative force is by
necessity also destructive.
In the remarkable rise of Chicago into a
bustling hub of commerce, the railroad played
a supreme role, linking eastern markets to
western grazing lands, while industry became
a magnet for immigrant laborers, creating a
great mix of foreign tongues and an
atmosphere of strife and competition.
50. Sandburg ends his first stanza with a colon. By
personifying Chicago as a loutish, yet admirable
person with "Big Shoulders," Sandburg gives the
city attributes of a human being; the technique is
actually employed throughout the poem to
emphasize the living character of the city.
In the second stanza, Sandburg uses a literary
device known as the apostrophe when he
addresses the city as a person, in a way one might
discuss someone's disreputable reputation with
that person in a manly manner while drinking
beer in a rough tavern:
They tell me you are wicked...
...they tell me you are crooked…
...they tell me you are brutal….
51. The repetition of the phrase ―they tell me you
are...‖ emphasizes the fierce criticism people
have on the city, and the words, ―wicked‖,
―crooked‖ and ―brutal‖ paint a negative picture
of the city as well as epitomize how much bad
stuff has been talked about the city.
Sandburg actually almost proudly, agrees with
the vague accusations against Chicago. He
accepts, ―yes,‖ the city is indeed…
wicked, ―…I have seen your painted women
under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.‖
52. It’s also crooked, ―…I have seen the gunman kill and
go free and kill again.‖
And brutal, ―…In the faces of women and children I
have seen the marks of wanton hunger.‖
Indeed, the quick-changing nature of capitalism often
worsened conditions with economic injustices, thus
the condition is clearly depicted here, "On the faces of
women and children I have seen the marks of wanton
hunger.―
Sandburg then treats the city initially as having fallen
from the path of righteousness, a den of iniquities
with its starving citizens and its "painted women under
the gas lamps luring the farm boys" (for the hotel and
railroad districts inevitably brought the big-city vices
of prostitution and crime).
53. Sandburg is being realistic and seems to agree
with Chicago's bad reputation.
However, the he recognizes all this roughness
as part of the excitement and vivacity of what it
means to be Chicago:
“…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.”
54. In the next stanza, Sandburg shifts from
personification to rough simile, "Fierce as a
dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning
as a savage pitted against the wilderness".
Then, he pairs the opening list of five epithets
with single word participles emphasizing
activities:
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding
55. Building on that crescendo, which is really an
ode to the working man, Sandburg adds form
and focus to those words and couples
personification with simile comparing the city
with a laughing person:
"...laughing with white teeth,...laughing as
a young man laughs...Laughing even as an
ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost
a battle.../...and under his ribs the heart of
the people, Laughing!“
That laughing is both the joy of living, the
self-awareness of the powerful nature of
"Youth, half-naked, sweating...‖ and the
ignorant and somewhat naïve nature of the
growing city.
56. This is indeed a vision presented in a fiercely-
toned poem, a tone which matches the city's
animal fury and rabid hunger for progress, for
Sandburg's Chicago is "Fierce as a dog with
tongue lapping for action, cunning as a
savage pitted against the wilderness.―
No matter how celebrated or demeaning the
city is, Chicago is indeed "proud to be
Hog/Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with/Railroads and Freight Handler to
the Nation.―
Therefore, one can see that while Sandburg
previously recognizes the people's and cities'
failures, he also cheers the invincibility of
their souls.
57. Thus, Sandburg depiction of the city is of youth,
high spirits, strength, and masculinity - a city
sweat, with head lifted, shirtless, muscular, with
bruised knuckles and soiled fingernails.
He could have focused on sensitive artists,
classical musicians, lyric poets, and the studious
intelligentsia, but that was not his vision of
Chicago.
For Sandburg, Chicago is a defiant, almost
mythological entity that offers both deliverance
and pain to humankind.
We then get the distinct impression here that
Sandburg's ode to Chicago is his realization of the
dichotomy of a city life and urbanization and its
effect on human beings, at the same time it is the
expression of the poet’s pride in his country.
58. While ―Chicago‖ is a rousing piece of writing
about the lives of people in Chicago and about
the city as a whole. ―Halsted Street Car‖ is a focus
on a particular scene of the more pessimistic
aspect of the city.
Halsted Street Car
Come you, cartoonists,
Hang on a strap with me here
At seven o'clock in the morning
On a Halsted street car.
Take your pencils
And draw these faces.
59. Try with your pencils for these crooked faces,
That pig-sticker in one corner—his mouth—
That overall factory girl—her loose cheeks.
Find for your pencils
A way to mark your memory
Of tired empty faces.
After their night's sleep,
In the moist dawn
And cool daybreak,
Faces
Tired of wishes,
Empty of dreams.
60. The recurring idea in this is the reference to
cartoonists and drawing. It shows us that
people far too often focus on the upper class
and not enough on the working class and
poor.
The "cartoonists" in this poem can either be
cartoonists in newspapers, who often focus
too much on politics and the wealthy.
Or the "cartoonists" could refer to us, the
readers. It's Sandburg's way of saying "if you
want to really see life, look at these people."
61. Again, Sandburg presents us with a beautiful
poem that focuses on the people that make
up the city.
The poem is set in a street car on the way to
work, where Sandburg describes the people as
"Tired of wishes, empty of dreams‖.
This says a lot about the people who work so
hard that they have ceased to have big dreams
about their lives.
Chicago was a hard city back then. The
people were tired--of working and of
dreaming. But Sandburg is telling us that
these people are where the real stories lie.
62. In ―Halsted Street Car‖ then the reality is
treated in a more gloomy way than in
―Chicago‖. Now, a real aspect of a working
class’s daily life is laid bare.
If the Chicagoans as a whole are being proud
of the city and are keeping up with hard work
to make the growth of the city, there are also
those who are left behind and can not keep up
with the fast growing city of Chicago. These
people deserve real intention and care.
63. While in ―Chicago‖ Sandburg celebrates the
pride of the city, in this poem he also makes
clear that unless the backbone of the city, the
working class, is treated with care, unless
their dream is fulfilled, the city and America
can never really progress.
Thus, Sandburg, in this poem, might be called
―a pragmatic humanist‖ as the critic, Gay
Wilson Allen, stated in South Atlantic
Quarterly (1960), he is indeed ―not a
Naturalist who believes that human nature is
simply animal nature; or a supernaturalist,
who has an equally low opinion of mankind.‖
64. Allen also added that, ―Sandburg writes of man in
the physical world, and he…regards the enemies of
humanity as either social or political. Man’s
salvation, he thinks, is his instinctive yearning for a
better world; in the practical sense: idealism, the
―dream‖.
- Gay Wilson Allen. South Atlantic Quarterly.
Summer, 1960, p. 318
In summary, ―Chicago‖ and ―Halsted Street Car‖ can
be the epitome of thriving America in the first
period of the 20th century. They carry with them the
American dreams and the positive impacts of the
Industrial Revolution. At the same time Sandburg
urges his readers not to forget the reality of the
negative impacts urbanization and industrialization
have on human beings.
65. Allen, Gay Wilson. South Atlantic Quarterly. Summer, 1960, p. 318
Hackett, Francis. Horizons (Huebsch-Viking),1918.
Twain, Mark. Life on the Mississippi.1883.
http://carl-sandburg.com/POEMS.htm
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/sandburg/sandb
urg_life.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_%28poem%29
http://edsitement.neh.gov/lesson-plan/carl-sandburgs-chicago-
bringing-great-city-alive
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/28
