by Kerry Michael Wood

Created on: October 04, 2010   Last Updated: October 19, 2010

Carl Sandburg’s free verse poem Chicago is a pair of extended apostrophes.  An apostrophe is not just a punctuation mark indicating possession or contraction but also a piece of figurative language – in this case an address to a city, which is incapable of responding and later to small town critics of Chicago who, not being present, have no way of answering.

In lines 1 – 3 the poet refers to the American metropolis by means of its industries: meat packing, machining, grain storage, railway depots, and storage and forwarding of freight.

Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;

Then he lists manly adjectives that apply to all those areas of work and ends with a nickname suggestive of raw strength and machismo.

Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:

Having addressed the city in a series of brief Americanized epithets, he shifts to lengthy lines to apostrophize the sneering critics – the nameless and voiceless “they” of smaller and softer townships. He readily, almost proudly, agrees with the vague accusations against Chicago supplying specifics. Yes, the city is wicked,

. . .for I have seen your painted women. . .luring the farm boys.

Also crooked,

. . . I have seen the gunman kill and go free and kill again.

Brutal,

. . .In the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.

At line 10 he returns the sneers asking the detractors to name a city that is more alive and more proud.

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. . .

Sandburg makes complimentary such ordinarily negative words as “coarse. . .cunning (twice). . .fierce. . . savage.” Then he pairs the opening list of 5 epithets with single word participles emphasizing activity:

Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding

Finally, using Walt Whitmanesque repetition, he increases his line length before repeating his opening four lines with variation of order in a climactic conclusion .

                 . . .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.

It may be incidental that Sandburg's nine iterations of forms of the verb laugh match the number of times Whitman used "singing" in I Hear America Singing.

The poet depicted a city 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. Nor, having read the verse, is it ours.

Well might Chicago be included among poems whose language and rhythms are rough, two-fisted, rough-housing, virile - anything but lyrical or poetic.

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