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Carl Sandburg – The Chicago Poems

By Glynn Young 6 Comments

Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems were published in 1916, when he was 34 years old. “Chicago, ” the poem that helped establish his reputation, was published in Poetry Magazine two years before that. (It contains the line Chicagoans love – “City of Big Shoulders.”)

Except for “Chicago, ” I hadn’t read any of these poems before. As I read those collected with “Chicago” and the others grouped under the headings of “Fogs and Fires, ” “Shadows, ” and “Other Days, ” the words and themes and ideas were oddly familiar. After searching my memory for a while, I realized two connections.

First was the obvious one. Sandburg’s Chicago poems are of the same root as Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle. Sinclair was focused upon telling the story of the plight of immigrants at the turn of the 20th century and how they were exploited by employers, landlords and shopkeepers. And the novel did cause quite a stir when it was published, but not for reason Sinclair had hoped. Readers focused on the descriptions of the meatpacking industry, and national outrage led to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act, which established the Food & Drug Administration. Everyone overlooked or forgot about the immigrants.

In the Chicago Poems, Sandburg writes about the immigrants and laborers who helped turn Chicago into the economic powerhouse it became. And many of the poems clearly have a Sinclair kind of feel to them. Take “Onion Days, ’ for example:

Mrs. Gabrielle Giovannitti comes along Peoria Street every morning at nine o’clock
With kindling wood piled on top of her head, her eyes looking straight ahead to
find the way for her old feet.
Her daughter-in-law, Mrs. Pietro Giovannitti, whose husband was killed in a tunnel
Explosion through the negligence of a fellow-servant,
Works ten hours a day, sometimes twelve, picking onions for Jasper on the Bowmanville road.

Jasper, as it turns out, sits in his Episcopal church service, enjoys the chanting of the Nicene Creed, and plans how to advertise the onion-picking jobs so he can attract even more applicants and drive wages down.

The second connection I made was that the Sandburg poems evoke the same kind of thoughts and feelings when I look at paintings by Edward Hopper. I‘ve written three poems about Hopper paintings and posted them at my own blog, and reading these works by Sandburg put the paintings back in mind. It may be that, chronologically, Sinclair, Sandburg and Hooper were of overlapping generations, and Sinclair and Sandburg both had a strong Chicago connection. And one of Hopper’s most famous paintings, Nighthawks, is in the Chicago Art Institute.

All said, I enjoyed reading Sandburg’s poems. They are of a period – some of them include language and ethnic nicknames that would be deemed politically incorrect today – but they are good stuff. And I read the Dover thrift edition of the Chicago Poems, which cost me all of $2. Can’t beat that price.

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Glynn Young
Glynn Young
Editor and Twitter-Party-Cool-Poem-Weaver at Tweetspeak Poetry
Glynn Young lives in St. Louis where he retired as the team leader for Online Strategy & Communications for a Fortune 500 company. Glynn writes poetry, short stories and fiction, and he loves to bike. He is the author of the Civil War romance Brookhaven, as well as Poetry at Work and the Dancing Priest Series. Find Glynn at Faith, Fiction, Friends.
Glynn Young
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Filed Under: Poems, poetry, poetry reviews, poetry teaching resources, writer's group resources

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Comments

  1. nAncY says

    November 17, 2009 at 1:06 am

    wonderful of you to share thoughts on what you have been reading.

    Reply
  2. Maureen Doallas says

    November 17, 2009 at 1:28 pm

    Really enjoyed reading about what you’re reading, Glynn. Good stuff indeed!

    Reply
  3. L.L. Barkat says

    November 18, 2009 at 8:52 pm

    Love all these connections you’ve made, Glynn. Marvelous.

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. National Poetry Month: Carl Sandburg | Tweetspeak PoetryTweetspeak Poetry says:
    May 29, 2013 at 3:19 pm

    […] Carl Sandburg (1878 – 1967) is another poet who, like Walt Whitman and Robert Frost, could qualify as “America’s Poet.” He has the distinction of receiving two Pulitzer Prizes, one for volume 2 of his biography of Abraham Lincoln (Abraham Lincoln: The War Years and one for his Complete Poems. […]

    Reply
  2. 4 Spooky Tips for Writing a Halloween Poem - says:
    October 20, 2016 at 8:47 am

    […] There are plenty of Halloweenish poems out there beyond Poe’s classic The Raven. One of my new favorites is “Theme in Yellow” by Carl Sandburg. […]

    Reply
  3. under the harvest moon – sleepy time says:
    May 30, 2023 at 2:26 pm

    […] by Carl Sandburg […]

    Reply

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