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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 once said, “I will be the word of the people. Mine will be the bleeding mouth from which the gag is snatched. I will say everything!”◦ Went against the Modernist

Movement as he celebrated the George Wilsons of the world and not the Daisy Buchanans.

Died in 1967 of old age

An Analysis

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.