chicago carl sandburg

“Chicago” and “Halsted Street Car”

By

Carl Sandburg

Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, 1951

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.

Biographical Information

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.


Hobo: The term is used tomean a migratory worker or homeless vagabond, especially one who is penniless. The term originated in the Western—probably Northwestern—United States during the last decade of the 19th century. Unlike 'tramps', who work only when they are forced to, and 'bums', who do not work at all, 'hobos' are workers who wander.

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.


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).


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.

Critical Reception:

“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.

Critical Reception:

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.

Critical Reception:

Chicago, Then and Now

Chicago

The United States of America

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.

Chicago: City of the Big Shoulders

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.

Steamboats on the Mississippi River, 1885

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.


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

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.


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


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.

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.


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.


Grand Central Station was opened on Dec 8, 1890.

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

“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

“Mamie”

The Court of Honor, Chicago’s Word Fair,1893, its White City with the Court of Honor inspired many city planning projects nationwide.

The Court of Honor of the World’s Columbian Exhibition, 1893

The picture of the Ferris Wheel at the 1893 Chicago World Fair

21st Chicago

The Chicago Board of Trade, established in 1848.

Chicago Board of Trade, 21st Century

The trading room of the Board of Trade, 1903

Trade floor of the Board of

Trade, 21st century

“The Hog Butcher to the world”

Working class people in a glass and steel

industry

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.

A crowded streetcar

“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)

Prior to Sandburg’s “Chicago”

Chicago Poems (1916)

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.

Chicago Poems:

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.

Chicago Poems:

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;

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.

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.

Discussion:

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.

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….

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.”

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).

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 andcunning.”

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

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.

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.

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.

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 CarCome you, cartoonists, Hang on a strap with me here At seven o'clock in the morning On a Halsted street car.

Take your pencilsAnd draw these faces.

“Halsted Street Car”

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 pencilsA 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.

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."

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.

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.

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.”

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.

Allen, Gay Wilson. South Atlantic Quarterly. Summer, 1960, p. 318Hackett, Francis. Horizons (Huebsch-Viking),1918.Twain, Mark. Life on the Mississippi.1883.http://carl-sandburg.com/POEMS.htmhttp://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/sandburg/sandburg_life.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_%28poem%29

http://edsitement.neh.gov/lesson-plan/carl-sandburgs-chicago-bringing-great-city-alivehttp://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/28

References

http://carl-sandburg.com/POEMS.htm



http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/sandburg/sandburg_life.htm







http://edsitement.neh.gov/lesson-plan/carl-sandburgs-chicago-bringing-great-city-alive




http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/28



chicago carl sandburg

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