Carl Sandburg

Carl Sandburg (January 6, 1878 – July 22, 1967) was an American poet, biographer, and collector and performer of folk songs. Not many poets are as appreciated in their lifetimes as Sandburg, receiving three Pulitzer prizes (two for poetry and one for a biography of Lincoln), a Grammy, and having his collection of folk songs go through many editions. His performances of these songs, as well as recitations of his poems, were also well received.

His first major poetry collection was Chicago Poems, published in 1916. (Professor Philip Green Wright paid to have a pamphlet of Sandburg’s poetry, Reckless Ecstasy, published in 1904.) As the name suggests, most of the poems have to do with Chicago, where he moved in 1913. He was an editorial writer for the Chicago Daily News. This is when Harriet Monroe, the founder and publisher of Poetry magazine, a well-respected and influential publication, read his poems and started to publish them. In 1918 the book Cornhuskers came out, followed in 1920 by Smoke and Steel.

Sandburg wrote in free verse, giving his poems a freedom and vitality that adherence to standard forms might not have. His were poems of working men and women, the strength of common people, and the rough, tough, realism of life in the industrial age. And yet he found beauty in this realistic side of life. Although there is no rhythm of a rhyming scheme, his poems have a movement and a rhythm of big city life.

Usually, I like to pick something less well-known when I share a poem, but today we’ll look at Chicago, the first poem in Chicago Poems, and probably one of the most quoted. Enjoy!

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 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.