Chicago (poem)
"Chicago" is a
city of Chicago that became his adopted home. It first appeared in Poetry, March 1914, the first of nine poems collectively titled "Chicago Poems". It was republished in 1916 in Sandburg's first mainstream collection of poems, also titled Chicago Poems
.
Sandburg moved to
Milwaukee, where he had served as secretary to Emil Seidel, Milwaukee's Socialist mayor. Harriet Monroe, a fellow resident of Chicago, had founded the magazine Poetry in 1912. Monroe liked and encouraged Sandburg's plain-speaking free verse style, strongly reminiscent of Walt Whitman. Chicago Poems established Sandburg as a major figure in contemporary literature.[1]
Sandburg has described the poem as[2]
a chant of defiance by Chicago... its defiance of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, London, Paris, Berlin and Rome. The poem sort of says "Maybe we ain't got culture, but we're eatin' regular."
The Chicago Poems and its follow-up volumes of verse, Cornhuskers (1918) and Smoke and Steel (1920), represent Sandburg's attempts to create an
railroad
hub; these industries are also mentioned in the poem.
One of Chicago's many nicknames, "City of the Big Shoulders," is taken from the poem's fifth line.
See also
References
- JSTOR 20570797.
- ^ Corwin, Norman (1961). The World of Carl Sandburg. Harcourt, Brace & World. p. 32.
External links
The full text of Chicago at Wikisource- Sandburg, Carl (1914-03-01). "Chicago". Poetry. 3 (6): 191–192. JSTOR 20569994.
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