Places: Chicago Poems

*Chicago. Chicago PoemsIllinois’s largest city and the industrial and commercial center of the Midwest. Sandburg’s poetry depicts Chicago as a mythic figure, a city personified as a kind of superman–optimistic, pugnacious, and indomitable. Ultimately, Sandburg celebrates the city’s unquenchable vitality and energy. The most familiar poem in his collection, “Chicago,” is most notable for its form, which, like a jazz composition or the expanding grid of the city itself, keeps going on its own momentum. The city and the poem are open-ended structures, and Sandburg’s “Chicago” is both utterly real and strangely mythological. The stockyards, railroads, skyscrapers, criminals, prostitutes, and marginal characters it describes are painfully accurate.

Many of Sandburg’s poems break Chicago’s massive cityscape down into comprehensible lives, in which frustrations, dashed hopes, and unfulfilled longings define the everyday existence of the working-class people, who make up the vast majority of the city’s residents. Sandburg’s poems are all telling examples of his socially conscious verse. He is also sensitive to the plight of the mushrooming ethnic populations, especially the Italians and Eastern Europeans, as shown in such poems as “Child of the Romans” and “Happiness,” the latter celebrating a family of Hungarians enjoying a picnic on the banks of the Des Plaines River.