“We Wear the Mask”



“Chicago”

“Chicago” – Carl Sandburg (Poet’s Life)

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.

Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition):"Chicago." Poetry for Students. Ed. Marie Rose Napierkowski and Mary Ruby. Vol. 3. Detroit: Gale, 1998. 60-77. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 6 Feb. 2014.

“Chicago” – Carl Sandburg (Historical Events)

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 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.

Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition):"Chicago." Poetry for Students. Ed. Marie Rose Napierkowski and Mary Ruby. Vol. 3. Detroit: Gale, 1998. 60-77. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 6 Feb. 2014.

“Chicago” – Carl Sandburg (Criticism)

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.

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.

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.”

Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition):"Chicago." Poetry for Students. Ed. Marie Rose Napierkowski and Mary Ruby. Vol. 3. Detroit: Gale, 1998. 60-77. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 6 Feb. 2014.

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