Chicago Poems

by Carl Sandburg

"Chicago Poems" is an early collection of poems by American poet Carl Sandburg. This little volume includes the following poems: Chicago, Sketch, Masses, Lost, The Harbor, They Will Say, Mill-Doors, Halsted Street Car, Clark Street Bridge, Passers-by, The Walking Man of Rodin, Subway, The Shovel Man, A Teamster's Farewell, Fish Crier, Picnic Boat, Happiness, Muckers, Blacklisted, Graceland, Child of the Romans, The Right to Grief, Mag, Onion Days, Population Drifts, Cripple, A Fence, Anna Imroth, Working Girls, Mamie, Personality, Cumulatives, To Certain Journeymen, Chamfort, Limited., The Has-Been, In a Back Alley, A Coin, Dynamiter, Ice Handler, Jack, Fellow Citizens, Nigger, Two Neighbors, Style, To Beachey—1912, Under a Hat Rim, In a Breath, Bath, Bronzes, Dunes, On the Way, Ready to Kill, To a Contemporary Bunkshooter, Skyscraper, Fog, Pool, Jan Kubelik, Choose, Crimson, Whitelight, Flux, Kin, White Shoulders, Losses, Troths, Killers, Among the Red Guns, Iron, Murmurings in a Field Hospital, Statistics,

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Fiction, American, United States, Americana, 20th Century

82 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1916

About the author

Free verse poems of known American writer Carl August Sandburg celebrated American people, geography, and industry; alongside his six-volume biography Abraham Lincoln (1926-1939), his collections of poetry include Smoke and Steel (1920).

This best editor won Pulitzer Prizes. Henry Louis Mencken called Carl Sandburg "indubitably an American in every pulse-beat."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_San...

Reviews

[Duane Parker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chicago Poems was published in 1916 and was Sandburg's first major volume of poetry. Most of the poems are about the city that he loved, and he viewed it as only a poet could; in it's starkness, it's beauty, and it's people. In it's first poem, the title poem, Chicago, Sandburg's first verse reads:

Hog butcher for the world,
Tool maker, stacker of wheat,
Player with railroads and the nation's freight handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of big shoulders.

Maybe the words are not so flattering, but he meant them. He wrote them with respect and with love.

Sandburg would write other volumes of poetry, and more as well. He won three Pulitzer Prize awards; two for poetry and one for his biography of Abraham Lincoln.

4 stars

[Jonfaith · Rating 2 out of 5]

Monday night just before bed I read a hundred pages of Dos Passos. It was only yesterday I elected to go this direction, the somewhat noted Chicago Poems. Whereas USA is a thousand pages of modernist poetic detail, the Chicago Poems are unfortunately poses, hokum, and “‘typifying' speeches"---which do little in terms of image or evocation. I am not sure annotation or critical reflection could salvage my experience, alas even the final reading was delayed due to our watching Terrence Malick ruminate on happiness amidst the Austin indie scene and the tempered philosophy of Ryan Gosling.

I’d avoid these.

[Xristina Karvouni · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lovely and brief poetry collection, which helped establishing Sandburg as a major figure in contemporary literature and a remarkable attempt at American social realism.

"I asked the professors who teach the meaning of life to tell me what is happiness".

[Peycho Kanev · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well, by far on of the greatest collections ever of one of the greatest American poets. I really love it, not only because I live in Chicago.

And here is my little contribution to this great city:


One Poet in Chicago

This city is scary and supreme.
Its shiny lakeshore with white yachts
and seagulls and herons, tilting
quietly upon the marble waves.
The hard-blowing wind,
licking the rind of the imposing trees.
Those crazy and beautiful people,
walking up and down the streets,
as the Sears tower pierces the alabaster sky.
A long time ago, in some small house,
Carl Sandburg was writing his dreams.
Not too far away, Hemingway learned
his way with the shotgun.
This city of butchers, gangsters
and sky-drinking poets.
This city of uncertainty
and misunderstood simplicity.
This city of fondness
and knives leading to oblivion.
But it is still early…
One of these days when you wake up with words
in your head transforming into money,
unallowable poet’s dreams…
God did not give His permission to each and every scrivener.
Cup of coffee or the unsolved color of the whiskey-
which absurd will the poet pick and choose?
This city will take care of it!
Back in the day, you could see the little Gwendolyn Brooks
skipping rope with the words forming in her head.
Now, the slam joints are full of screaming typesetters.
This is your place under the sun. City of destiny!
Do not leave it…
The stones of the ruined city wall
will never say: Goodbye!

[Lavinia · Rating 2 out of 5]

I thought I liked Sandburg. I read Maybe many years ago and it seemed funny, witty and different. And short, by all means. (Not in this volume)

Maybe he believes me, maybe not.
Maybe I can marry him, maybe not.

Maybe the wind on the prairie,
The wind on the sea, maybe,
Somebody, somewhere, maybe can tell.

I will lay my head on his shoulder
And when he asks me I will say yes,
Maybe.

At times, reading Chicago Poems feels like reading prose; not the short and witty stuff I expected. The city gets mythical proportions with its factories where people work for 6 dollars a week, the skyscrapers, the bridges, the subway, the cripples, the girl who's killed by the fire a.s.o. I cannot understand poets' fascination for the country, the land, the city, whatever. Thankfully, not all the poems are devoted to Chicago. Take At A Window, for instance

GIVE me hunger,
O you gods that sit and give
The world its orders.
Give me hunger, pain and want,
Shut me out with shame and failure
From your doors of gold and fame,
Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger!

But leave me a little love,
A voice to speak to me in the day end,
A hand to touch me in the dark room
Breaking the long loneliness.
In the dusk of day-shapes
Blurring the sunset,
One little wandering, western star
Thrust out from the changing shores of shadow.
Let me go to the window,
Watch there the day-shapes of dusk
And wait and know the coming
Of a little love.

***
I was thinking of reading Plath's poetry before moving on to her journals, but now, I don't know, I might just skip it.

[Mel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly recommended and most enjoyable. The format for the Kindle version is a bit odd in spots but not hard to overcome. Great poems about Chicago and some other topics as well.

[Flo · Rating 3 out of 5]

They will say
Of my city the worst that men will ever say is this:
You took little children away from the sun and the dew,
And the glimmers that played in the grass under the great sky,
And the reckless rain; you put them between walls
To work, broken and smothered, for bread and wages,
To eat dust in their throats and die empty-hearted
For a little handful of pay on a few Saturday nights.

Sandburg described quite starkly and poignantly the faces tired of wishes, empty of dreams.

Jan 15, 19
* Maybe on my blog.

[Joseph Spuckler · Rating 5 out of 5]

From the city of broad shoulders to clouds moving in on cat’s paws this collection is Sandburg’s love letter to the city of Chicago. It’s a collection of tough blue collars workers, immigrants, questions on war (WWI) and suspicions of government. It is written in plain language of the people he represents and hits with a punch but at the same time eloquent.

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Over Christmas, while visiting family in Indianapolis, I stopped in Half-Price Books. I’d already planned to get this year’s books from the library, but I hadn’t arranged for one before leaving town, and I wanted to make sure I had something in hand from my reading list to get started with. I found a hardcover copy of “Seinfeldia.” It was early in the day — I had hours to kill before dinner with two of my sisters — and I settled down in front of the Classics and Poetry section. My mind was hungering for something. There it was: “The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg.” It hit me like a bolt out of the blue. I snatched it from the shelf, sat on the floor, and immediately got lost in “Chicago,” “Masses,” “They Will Say,” “The Shovel Man,” “A Teamster’s Farewell,” “Muckers” … I left the book on the shelf (I should have purchased it), added “Chicago Poems” to my reading list, and, when I’d returned home after the holidays, found a copy in my local library.

Upon Sandburg’s death in 1967, Lyndon B. Johnson observed, “Carl Sandburg was more than the voice of America, more than the poet of its strength and genius. He was America.” After reading, and reflecting upon, Sandburg’s first published collection of poetry, 1916’s “Chicago Poems,” truer words were never spoken. Sandburg sees people, events, things, as they are: sometimes raw, unflinching, unblinking, concretely; other times beautifully, elegiacally, figuratively; but always — always — openly, honestly, ever traveling, ever seeking — ALIVE. No poet’s poet, nor writer’s writer, Sandburg is a poet of the people, for the people. Unsentimental, straight-talker, swagger in his gait … If only Carl Sandburg were here to train his pencil, his eye, his words, on America today: how we’d cheer, how we’d weep, how we’d wrap ourselves up in the comfort of someone who understands us, who sees us, who loves us, who said, “I am credulous about the destiny of man, and I believe more than I can ever prove of the future of the human race and the importance of illusions …”

[Chunyang Ding · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not entirely sure how to consume collections of poetry - in the past, I had always either looked up individual occasional poems, or dissected them for English courses. More than that, it felt almost sacrilegious to read a collection of poems rooted so deeply in Chicago and the Midwest, while staying indoors in that very city, in self-isolation.

Despite those stumbling blocks, I found Sandburg's poems to be beautifully written, especially for the common people. The imagery, themes, and language are mostly grounded in a daily worker's life, rather than some high and lofty abstract expression. Sandburg really appears to be a poet of the people.

[B Malley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sandburg's at his best when talking about people and putting them in a setting; otherwise it's a lot of 'crimson splashed up into the sky' and scarves and 'silver moon breaking.'

[Illiterate · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tries to do for Chicago as Whitman did for America. Top tips: Skyscraper & At a Window.

[Mjm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sandburg unequivocally stands alongside the very greatest of American Poets, not least because the same author who gives us one of most celebrated examples of modern poetry, a verse so universal that my mother would recite it to me before I'd learned to read (i.e. THE fog comes / on little cat feet. / It sits looking / over harbor and city / on silent haunches / and then moves on.) and yet could produce work as profound as any metaphysical poet, drawing the tension between the mundane and the eternal with a conciseness perhaps only rivaled by Emily Dickinson (and with a humor all his own:)

I AM riding on a limited express, one of the crack trains
of the nation.
Hurtling across the prairie into blue haze and dark air
go fifteen all-steel coaches holding a thousand people.
(All the coaches shall be scrap and rust and all the men
and women laughing in the diners and sleepers shall
pass to ashes.)
I ask a man in the smoker where he is going and he
answers: "Omaha."

* * *

"Carl Sandburg- he ain't just for cat-footed fog anymore"

[Ana · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some poems stood out, but overall, I don't think I like the poet's style so maybe this collection just wasn't for me.

[Natalie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was semi-familiar with Sandburg ("The Fog" and "The Junk Man" are burned into my brain, though I have no idea where I first encountered them) but have no record of reading a collection of his previously.

I really, really liked this.

It's not pompous poetry. It's accessible without being too simple. The poems are vivid, hypnotic, tough, and full of imagery that pulls me directly into a place and time where I did/do not exist.

Chicago Poems and War Poems were my favorite sections, which surprised me. Chicago is a city that is not too far from where I live. I've been directly in the city a few times and on the outskirts (the airport, a suburb, a concert) a handful more. I definitely don't know it in my bones or hold it close to my heart. War is something I've never experienced firsthand. These poems are almost full stories, stories of poverty and class and dirty yet beloved streets and realities of war and hard, human characters and experiences.

Buttons

I have been watching the war map slammed up for advertising in
front of the newspaper office.
Buttons - red and yellow buttons - blue and black buttons - are shoved back and forth across the map.

A laughing young man, sunny with freckles,
Climbs a ladder, yells a joke to somebody in the crowd,
And then fixes a yellow button one inch west
And follows the yellow button with a black button one inch west.

(Ten thousand men and boys twist on their bodies in a red soak
along a river edge,
Gasping of wounds, calling for water, some rattling death in their
throats.)
Who would guess what it cost to move two buttons one inch on the
war map here in the front of the newspaper office where the
freckle-faced young man is laughing to us?

These are poems that need to be read out loud, often just for the fantastic sound of the words -

A Teamster's Farewell
Sobs En Route to a Penitentiary

Good-by now to the streets and the clash of wheels and locking hubs,
The sun coming on the brass buckles and harness knobs,
The muscles of the horses sliding under their heavy haunches,
Good-by now to the traffic policeman and his whistle,
The smash of the iron hoof on the stones,
All the crazy wonderful slamming roar of the street -
O God, there's noises I'm going to be hungry for.

4 Stars

[John Reis · Rating 2 out of 5]

Written in 1916, Sandburg’s Chicago cannot be much different than my great-grandparents found when they all arrived twenty years earlier. Based on his poems, why did they come? What did they see? Sandburg sees dirt and smoke and poverty and soot and blood. Bitter socialist. Nothing good here! Nothing worth seeing! Low people, low deeds. Whether rich or poor, Sandburg’s Chicagoans are all meager souls.

My great grandparents did not see any of this. They may have been desperate when they started their journeys but to them Chicago was hope. And hope is not dirty and grim and in need of bloody revolution. Tear it down! Tear it all down!

Sandburg’s is a low, petty, bitter picture of the White City as it was called just 20 years earlier.

Then there is the verse itself. Is this poetry? Is it verse? What makes it so. The uneven margin at the right? This is prose.

And then there is the audiobook. The narrator is not from Chicago. He does not know how to say Des Plaines. There are also common words he cannot pronounce; traipse comes to mind.

[Kaesa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not every poem in this holds up well, but many of them are furious and unfortunately still relevant, and I'm not really sure how to review a super short book of poetry -- to be honest, I don't know how to talk about poetry at all other than like, "it made me have feelings!" -- so I'm just going to post one of them in its entirety. I have some questions about the line breaks or lack thereof in the fifth line (I've seen a few different versions of that) but the last six words are painful.

Anna Imroth

Cross the hands over the breast here—so.
Straighten the legs a little more—so.
And call for the wagon to come and take her home.
Her mother will cry some and so will her sisters and brothers.
But all of the others got down and they are safe and this is the only one of the factory girls who wasn't lucky in making the jump when the fire broke.
It is the hand of God and the lack of fire escapes.

[Trevor Seigler · Rating 3 out of 5]

Years ago, I went on a field trip to Carl Sandburg's home in the mountains of North Carolina (just a short jaunt from my hometown), and I was always vaguely familiar with his name ever after but I never actually read any of his work. Well, I've rectified that now, with this collection. "Chicao Poems" is about the changing nation at the time Sandburg was writing it (the 1910s) and the urban environment that had little been celebrated in poetry before him (most poets celebrating the natural world of rural America more often than not). Sandburg sees the beauty in steel, concrete and brick-and-mortar, writing hymns to skyscrapers like Shakespeare wrote odes to summer days and Keats wrote odes to Greek urns. His poetry is very compelling in places, and even the lesser poems still hold a measure of wonder to them. I've found myself more receptive to poetry of late, and "Chicago Poems" is a collection that I'm glad I stumbled upon when I did.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Going to admit to having somewhat read this more as prose rather than in a slower absorbing fashion appropriate for poetry.

This is my first time reading Carl Sandburg. In the most low sense of a review, I felt I was reading a 1914 urban Walt Whitman, though the tone was appropriately less mellifluous than a rural Whitman and more bold and jagged like the urban landscape Sandburg paints. A lot of depressing poems. A lot of awkward social commentary. A lot regarding WWI. Some very nice rural poems.

This was definitely a good read and I’ll had to read it again with more attention. Again, the best I can say about this collection is it’s a 1914 urban Whitman. The style is sometimes uncomfortably Whitman-esque. Not saying Sandburg is a Whitman knockoff but there was something about the style that lacked originality.

[Jimmy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I used to write poetry like this in college. Thankfully, I no longer do. As poetry goes, it's not very good. But in a time when we have Republicans cutting food stamps and Headstart while sucking up to the rich, Carl Sandburg is a breath of fresh air.

Like these:

MASSES
by Carl Sandburg

AMONG the mountains I wandered and saw blue haze and
red crag and was amazed;
On the beach where the long push under the endless tide
maneuvers, I stood silent;
Under the stars on the prairie watching the Dipper slant
over the horizon's grass, I was full of thoughts.
Great men, pageants of war and labor, soldiers and workers,
mothers lifting their children--these all I
touched, and felt the solemn thrill of them.
And then one day I got a true look at the Poor, millions
of the Poor, patient and toiling; more patient than
crags, tides, and stars; innumerable, patient as the
darkness of night--and all broken, humble ruins of nations.




TO A CONTEMPORARY BUNKSHOOTER

You come along. . . tearing your shirt. . . yelling about
Jesus.
Where do you get that stuff?
What do you know about Jesus?
Jesus had a way of talking soft and outside of a few
bankers and higher-ups among the con men of Jerusalem
everybody liked to have this Jesus around because
he never made any fake passes and everything
he said went and he helped the sick and gave the
people hope.


You come along squirting words at us, shaking your fist
and calling us all damn fools so fierce the froth slobbers
over your lips. . . always blabbing we're all
going to hell straight off and you know all about it.


I've read Jesus' words. I know what he said. You don't
throw any scare into me. I've got your number. I
know how much you know about Jesus.
He never came near clean people or dirty people but
they felt cleaner because he came along. It was your
crowd of bankers and business men and lawyers
hired the sluggers and murderers who put Jesus out
of the running.


I say the same bunch backing you nailed the nails into
the hands of this Jesus of Nazareth. He had lined
up against him the same crooks and strong-arm men
now lined up with you paying your way.

This Jesus was good to look at, smelled good, listened
good. He threw out something fresh and beautiful
from the skin of his body and the touch of his hands
wherever he passed along.
You slimy bunkshooter, you put a smut on every human
blossom in reach of your rotten breath belching
about hell-fire and hiccupping about this Man who
lived a clean life in Galilee.

When are you going to quit making the carpenters build
emergency hospitals for women and girls driven
crazy with wrecked nerves from your gibberish about
Jesus--I put it to you again: Where do you get that
stuff; what do you know about Jesus?


Go ahead and bust all the chairs you want to. Smash
a whole wagon load of furniture at every performance.
Turn sixty somersaults and stand on your
nutty head. If it wasn't for the way you scare the
women and kids I'd feel sorry for you and pass the hat.
I like to watch a good four-flusher work, but not when
he starts people puking and calling for the doctors.
I like a man that's got nerve and can pull off a great
original performance, but you--you're only a bug-
house peddler of second-hand gospel--you're only
shoving out a phoney imitation of the goods this
Jesus wanted free as air and sunlight.

You tell people living in shanties Jesus is going to fix it
up all right with them by giving them mansions in
the skies after they're dead and the worms have
eaten 'em.
You tell $6 a week department store girls all they need
is Jesus; you take a steel trust wop, dead without
having lived, gray and shrunken at forty years of
age, and you tell him to look at Jesus on the cross
and he'll be all right.
You tell poor people they don't need any more money
on pay day and even if it's fierce to be out of a job,
Jesus'll fix that up all right, all right--all they gotta
do is take Jesus the way you say.
I'm telling you Jesus wouldn't stand for the stuff you're
handing out. Jesus played it different. The bankers
and lawyers of Jerusalem got their sluggers and
murderers to go after Jesus just because Jesus
wouldn't play their game. He didn't sit in with
the big thieves.

I don't want a lot of gab from a bunkshooter in my religion.
I won't take my religion from any man who never works
except with his mouth and never cherishes any memory
except the face of the woman on the American
silver dollar.

I ask you to come through and show me where you're
pouring out the blood of your life.

I've been to this suburb of Jerusalem they call Golgotha,
where they nailed Him, and I know if the story is
straight it was real blood ran from His hands and
the nail-holes, and it was real blood spurted in red
drops where the spear of the Roman soldier rammed
in between the ribs of this Jesus of Nazareth.

[Margaret Holbrook · Rating 4 out of 5]

Up until about 6/7 years ago I had never read any of Carl Sandburg's poetry and the first one I happened upon was 'Chicago', and it is my favourite, if their has to be one. It opens with the line, 'Hog butcher for the world', and what a line! I ordered this copy from Waterstones and a bargain at £1.99 - poetry isn't always expensive. I read through the book in 3 to 4 poem chunks, and what a read. You can feel the urgency in these poems, the life, the noise, the business of the everyday. It is a collection I will return to; and along the way I picked up another poem that struck me between the eyes, and that was, 'I Am the People, the Mob'. Carl Sandburg was born in Illinois in 1878. I'm so pleased I happened upon Chicago, it was my introduction to some wonderful poetry.

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

The jury is still out on whether I like Sandburg or not. What I DO know is that he is very good with words, creating beautiful and memorable images that reveal his heart for industrialism, cities, and the “common man.” This was the first volume in a book of the complete works of Sandburg so… to be continued...

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of the poems spoke to me, like this one:

"MARGARET

MANY birds and the beating of wings
Make a flinging reckless hum
In the early morning at the rocks
Above the blue pool
Where the gray shadows swim lazy.

In your blue eyes, O reckless child,
I saw today many little wild wishes,
Eager as the great morning."

But, uff, I guess people felt at liberty to use certain words back then that I wished he hadn't used in places.

[Gwynn · Rating 2 out of 5]

First time reading his work, and can appreciate his talent, cadence and insight. But extremely tired of white dudes using slurs. I no longer care when it was written, I will not "consider the time in which they lived" I'm saying I'm T I R E D of it.

[Ahmed Addnan Negim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mystic and incredibly unconventional , love it

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

always a trip to read an old-timey book that's racist against Italians

[Will · Rating 3 out of 5]

Look, poetry ain’t for me but Sandburg gets in his bag a couple times in this

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nA0UOiV...

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Being “dated” is a double-edged cutlass here. He pulls you back into that certain time and place, early 20th century Chicago. You can hear the wagons and cars. The saloon laughter. Smell the stockyards. Taste the dust. Sense the echoes of the war. Touch the poverty. But then there’s the “N” word. An artifact in this context, but a limitation nonetheless. It’s not his fault, per se. It just is. But there’s some great stuff in this collection. Worth visiting and revisiting. Just not my very favorite. Give it a go. Let me know what you think.....

[Rob Roehm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sandburg's imagery elevates the commonplace and working class to heroic levels and immortalizes them in verse. This collection evokes the early 1900s when the agrarian world clashed with the industrial.

[Morgan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A volume of poetry hasn’t grabbed me like this since Billy Collin’s “Horoscopes For The Dead.” 10/10 must read if you love Chicago and poetry.