SOURCE: Brumm, Anne-Marie. “The Cycle of Life: Motifs in the Chicago Poems of Carl Sandburg.” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik: A Quarterly of Language, Literature, and Culture 31, no. 3 (1983): 237-55.

[In the following essay, Brumm enumerates leitmotifs—including the innocent child, victimized maiden, and death—in Sandburg's Chicago Poems.]

Full of ideals and dreams, Carl Sandburg went to “the big city,” Chicago, for the first time in 1896. He was then only eighteen and his meager money only permitted him to remain three days, yet it was the beginning of a marked change in the young poet. Again and again, “Chi” would lure him to return. Carl Sandburg's response to Chicago was an intense one—one that would influence his entire life. It was also to be an ambivalent one. He loved Chicago, walking its long streets, drinking in its strange sights and basking in its blistering noise. But he hated it too—its suffering poor, its exploitation and its misery! Ofttimes, he could not accept the city's brutal reality, so he romanticized its scenes or rejected them completely and vehemently. Yet this very rejection would be the energizing agent in his work. The big city was the primary factor in the stimulation and nourishment of Carl Sandburg's work.

Chicago was the inspiration of Carl Sandburg's first feeble attempts at poetry and later of his first volume of verse, The Chicago Poems (1916).¹ This apostrophe to a city will be the main focus of my attention in this paper although references to other works will be made as necessary. The poetry itself, of course, mirrors the conflicts, the rejection and the responses mentioned above.

In the reading of the 260 pieces collectively known as the Chicago Poems, the poet's response to his city experience, one slowly begins to realize that there are certain people or objects that tend to appear again and again in the poetic limelight. Attention is focused on them so frequently that they become recurring refrains or leitmotifs. The motif of “the innocent child,” “the victimized maiden/mother,” “fertility-sterility,” “the deferred dream,” and “the small death” are some of the more important motifs I have been able to isolate. These appear again and again so that their presence borders on the formulaic.

One of these is the recurring appearance of the innocent child. The transcendentalist view of the child was one of complete innocence and goodness until maturity and adulthood. At that point, the individual would lose his innocence and all its accompanying virtues because he would become a victim of the “wicked and depraved society” that would destroy his goodness. The guilt for this “fall from innocence” stems not from the individual but from society in this case, the city.

In many of his poems, Sandburg portrays the cruel and stifling city depriving the innocent child of nature and preventing him from realizing his potential. “They Will Say” is a typical example. Frequently, various motifs may be combined within the same poem with the poet thereby attempting an even more completely powerful effect. For example, in “Chicago” both the child and mother are helpless victims of the city.

          And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is:
On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.

(3)

The harsh financial situation of the young urban family causes the husband in “May” to regret the day he married. His wife and children are again the innocent but unwanted victims. The day-to-day struggle to pay the grocer prevents this family from growing in love for one another. Instead, there is a desire for escape and separation.

Yes, I'm wishing now you lived somewhere away from here
And I was a bum on the bumpers a thousand miles away dead broke.
          I wish the kids had never come
          And rent and coal and clothes to pay for
          And a grocery man calling for cash,
          Every day cash for beans and prunes.
          I wish to God I never saw you, Mag.
          I wish to God the kids had never come.

(13)

The stockyards hunky cries over his dead child in “The Right to Grief” but is glad she is gone because of the high doctor bills. The child is not even allowed the luxury of her parents' true grief. The struggle for survival precludes the emergence of any more dignified human emotion.

Now his three year old daughter
Is in a white coffin that cost him a week's wages.
Every Saturday night he will pay the undertaker fifty cents till the debt is
          wiped out.
The hunky and his wife and the kids
Cry over the pinched face almost at peace in the white box.
They remember it was scrawny and ran up high doctor bills.
They are glad it is gone for the rest of the family now will have more to eat
          and wear.

(12-13)

Sandburg, as true naturalist and ardent socialist, believed that all these pathetic dilemmas could be avoided and even eliminated if only the city were “cleaned up.” With sufficient social legislation governing wages, living conditions, and child welfare, the child's life indeed could maintain its innocence and be free of problems. Eventually, he felt, this would all come about.

An individual that has not been “corrupted” by the city and retains his naiveté and innocence is therefore a child regardless of actual chronological age. In “Child of the Romans” (12), the dago shovelman is a child in Sandburg's eyes because he is simple and naive yet strong and enduring. He is satisfied with dry bread and bologna and content with his work even though it may be difficult and tiring. The harshness of his life has not touched his happy spirit.

In other poems, Sandburg exults in the natural curiosity and playfulness of the child. He is grateful “for the laughter of children who tumble barefooted and bareheaded in the summer grass” (“Our Prayer of Thanks,” 48). In “Child Moon,” the poet delights that:

The Child's wonder
At the old moon
Comes back nightly.

(60)

Society and the city have not yet destroyed his natural enthusiasm. Childhood has also traditionally been a metaphor for an idyllic and happy existence. It is a time of hope and a time for dreams.

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

(“Margaret,” 60)

The reality of existence will attempt to destroy this idealistic spirit.

In his own personal life, Sandburg also held the ideal of innocent childhood in high esteem. He never lost the capacity for the Adamic vision such as we find in Whitman and Thoreau. The genius of Sandburg, despite its panoramic range, was basically simple. He desired harmony and unity. His first inspiration was childhood. The openness, honesty and idealism of youth were thus always precious to him. Echoes of this may be heard in the following lines.

The hopes of youth have been scorched and scarred in me, but the romance of life has not burnt out nor the glory of living been extinguished. I may keep this born heart of mine, with tears for the tragic, love for the beautiful, laughter at folly, and silent, reverent contemplation of the common and everyday mysteries.²

Carl Sandburg took a great delight in recalling his boyhood days of which the many stories in Always the Young Stranger are a good example. North Callahan, who knew Sandburg, feels that the poet never really outgrew his youthful days. In fact one of the saddest things for him was that growing up was necessary in this life.³ Yet I think Sandburg felt that one could preserve the treasure of childhood if only one could retain the sense of wonder, the spontaneity and naturalness of youth. If only one could avoid the pitfalls of a monotonous conformity, a compromised conscience and an accepting servitude to a set way of life—even if it be to books. Even this can grow stagnant. In 1903, Sandburg wrote to his former teacher, Professor Wright

Scholarship is run amuck when it thinks it defines subconsciousness and then labels that as Soul. Culture, like madness, can run off a steep place and be drowned in the sea. Let us pray that books may always be a light on life that makes us wonder and be children in beautiful mystery, rather than we should think learning (not wisdom) is life.⁴

Sandburg also wrote a rich supply of children's stories which were highly successful and a delight to both children and adults ever since. The Rootabaga Stories (1922) are probably the best known. “If the people who read books don't like these stories there is no joy left in the world,” he said.⁵ They served as a source of joy in his own life which was often bleak and dark in feeling. Frank Lloyd Wright gave him the supreme tribute when he admitted:

I read your fairy tales nearly every night before I go to bed. They fill a long felt want—poetry. … O man! the beauty of the White Horse Girl and the Blue Wind Boy. …—the Skyscraper that decided to have a child.⁶

Throughout his long life and even into old age—after they had moved to North Carolina, Carl Sandburg was still popular with children. This innate love for the naiveté and innocence of children conveyed itself to the young ones and they warmed up naturally to the old man. “‘He had a way with children’ recalls Shoemaker, ‘the way some people have with animals: he could talk to them.’”⁷

Closely related to this motif of the “innocent child,” and stemming from the same romantic tradition, is the idea of the “victimized maiden.” In many poems, Sandburg depicts the plight of the idealistic and hopeful young woman as she encounters the big city. She soon finds herself in servitude to blind and uncontrollable forces which shatter her dreams and destroy her talents.

She comes to the city full of expectations but her ideals plummet as she is exploited and victimized. Some girls are fortunate; they find only boredom, meaninglessness and anonymity in the so-called glamorous world of business.

Ten-dollar-a-week stenographers take letters from corporation
          officers, lawyers, efficiency engineers, and tons of letters
          go bundled from the building to all ends of the earth.

(“To a Contemporary Bunkshooter,” 32)

Others are less fortunate; they become helpless victims of the factory assembly line. Freedom from the treadmill is far distant; the thought alone is luxury in their bleak existence. In “Noon Hour,” a woman grasps at a few moments' rest from her tedious job. The sweat of the walled factory is a direct contrast to the cool-moving things out on the free open ways.

She sits in the dust at the walls
          And makes cigars,
Bending at the bench
With fingers wage-anxious,
Changing her sweat for the day's pay.
Now the noon hour has come,
And she leans with her bare arms
On the window-sill over the river,
Leans and feels at her throat
Cool-moving things out of the free open ways:
At her throat and eyes and nostrils
The touch and the blowing cool
Of great free ways beyond the walls.

(70)

Some, like “Anna Imroth,” become victims of the factory's lack of adequate and safe working conditions. She was “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,” Sandburg shrewdly tells us (16).

In another instance, the city seems to have completely consumed Chick Lorimer, the girl everybody loved—“a wild girl keeping a hold / On a dream she wants.” And yet, “Nobody knows now where Chick Lorimer went” (“Gone,” 64).

Finally, there are those who become completely victimized and yield not only their creative spirits but also their bodies. Sandburg wrote many poems about prostitutes without moralizing or criticizing the women. They are usually portrayed sympathetically as helpless martyrs that have been beaten down by the evils of the city and its environment. The poet feels that some women in the city are being forced into such a life style by the strictures of the environmental conditions, hence they are not guilty or responsible for their actions. For example, in “Trafficker,” a young woman waits and waits.

Among the shadows where two streets cross,
A woman lurks in the dark and waits
To move on when a policeman heaves in view.
Smiling a broken smile from a face
Painted over haggard bones and desperate eyes,
All night she offers passers-by what they will
Of her beauty wasted, body faded, claims gone,
And no takers.

(62)

She is an object of pity, not of scorn. The city has sucked the entire fruit and left merely a shell behind. Painted, haunted and hungry are the adjectives that describe Sandburg's prostitutes. They are hollow on the inside with a facade attempting to conceal that façt from the world. In one of his most famous poems, “Chicago,” Sandburg draws on this motif of the victimized maiden in this way:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen
          your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.

(3)

Over and over we may hear the same formula: the basically good person has been corrupted by the evils of the city or the society. Never is the individual responsible for his own actions. Again, Sandburg believes that these conditions could be ameliorated if the appropriate social action were demanded by the people and undertaken by those responsible. If safety precautions such as fire escapes had been put into use by the store owners, employee Imroth would not have died. If the “villainous capitalists” would institute fair labor and wage policies, people would not go hungry and women would not need to turn to prostitution.

Passing through huddled and ugly walls
By doorways where women
Looked from their hunger-deep eyes,
Haunted with shadows of hunger-hands,
Out from the huddled and ugly walls.

(“The Harbor,” 5)

A lighter tone is audible in “It Is Much.”

Women of night life along the shadows,
Lean at your throats and skulking the walls,
Gaunt as a bitch worn to the bone,
Under the paint of your smiling faces:
          It is much to be warm and sure of tomorrow.

(62)

In the dialogue poem “Harrison Street Court,” we may listen to the prostitute speak. The utter futility of this type of life is conveyed:

“I been hustlin' now
Till I ain't much good any more.
I got nothin' to show for it.
Some man, got it all,
Every night hustlin' I ever did.”

(63)

“Soiled Dove” is a sardonic title for a strangely funny, aggressive kind of poem.

Let us be honest; the lady was not a harlot until she married
                    a corporation lawyer who picked her from a Ziegfeld chorus.

(63)

The following lines from “Poems Done on a Late Night Car” were the result of watching the painted faces of women on North Clark Street, Chicago.

“ II USED UP”

                              Roses,
                              Red roses
                              Crushed
          In the rain and wind
          Like mouths of women
          Beaten by the fists of
                    Men using them.
                              O little roses
                    And broken leaves
                    And petal wisps:
You that so flung your crimson
                                        To the sun
                    Only yesterday.

(61)

In part three of this poem, Sandburg tells us what his ideal place for women might be. Significantly it is entitled:

“HOME”

Here is a thing my heart wishes the world had more of:
I heard it in the air of one night when I listened
To a mother singing softly to a child, restless and angry in the darkness.

(62)

(It should be noted that throughout Sandburg's poetry, the traditional view of women is upheld and applauded in every respect.)

It is to be expected that such motifs as the innocent child and victimized maiden will at the same time be expressed in images of fertility and sterility. The same formula, as portrayed by the city poet, is a simplistic one. The city is industrial, mechanical, ignorant of and aloof to man's plight. Hence, it is a symbol of sterility and emptiness. Sandburg appears almost as a prophet crying in the wilderness—the wilderness of chaotic city streets. On the other hand, some of his poems contain an atmosphere of nature—idyllic, serene and natural, and therefore heavily infused with images of fertility. Quite often, the two are juxtaposed in the same poem.

For example, in the poem, “Halsted Street Car,” the fruitfulness of nature is directly contrasted to the sterility and emptiness of the people's daily existence—going to work in the factory. The potential rebirth of nature or of the individual has been destroyed by the factory's pistons. The riders are totally unaware of the pleasure and beauty to be gained from even the simple aspects of nature that surround them.

After their night's sleep,
In the moist dawn
And cool daybreak,
                    faces
Tired of wishes,
Empty of dreams.

(7)

In “The Harbor,” the terrifying emptiness of the haunted prostitutes is somewhat less pathetic when placed next to the freshness of nature at the city's edge. The beauty of the blue lake and the storm of gulls with flying white bellies create an aura of fruitfulness and wholeness.

Passing through huddled and ugly walls
By doorways where women
Looked from their hunger-deep eyes,
Haunted with shadows of hunger-hands,
Out from the huddled and ugly walls,
I came sudden, at the city's edge,
On a blue burst of lake,
Long lake waves breaking under the sun
On a spray-flung curve of shore;
And a fluttering storm of gulls,
Masses of great gray wings
And flying white bellies
Veering and wheeling free in the open.

(5)

The sterile empty life of “Nigger”—“sweated and driven for the harvest-wage”—and his memories of shackles are counterbalanced by the burgeoning fertility of “the sun and dew dripping, heaving life of the jungle.” (23)

Often the fertility-sterility motif will be expressed in terms of a fruit or flower. The poet's fertile imagination can transform a deserted city brickyard into an idyllic place where:

Under the curving willows,
And round the creep of the wave line,
Fluxions of yellow and dusk on the waters
Make a wide dreaming pansy of an old pond in the night.

(“Nocturne in a Deserted Brickyard,” 56)

The final stage in this cycle of conception (maiden)-birth, (child)-life, (fertility-sterility) is death. Death, in the Judaic-Christian tradition, has always had an aura of dignity and sacredness about it. A person died surrounded by loved ones and with the sacraments of the Church. The death of the hero was also the highpoint of a Greek tragedy. In the poetry of the city, however, another image of death emerges—what I have termed the “small death.” Death has become insignificant and meaningless. The population in the city is so dense that no one notices one mere individual that is dying. He frequently faces death fearful and alone without the comfort of religion and friends. It is devoid of dignity and greatness; it is a dead end without a passageway to an everlasting life. In the city, Charon and his ferryboat have no place.

Naturalistic scientific notions of death also enter into Sandburg's thinking here. He believes that the small deaths that occur need not happen if the social ills of the city were corrected. It would seem as though death itself were merely a social evil that could eventually be cured if and when scientific and sociological techniques became sufficiently advanced. This is a belief still widely held today by social scientists, educators, and many others. The idea of death being a natural and final component of the life and growth process is completely disregarded.

Characteristics of the “small death” are present in the poem, “They Will Say.” Hard labor and the miserable conditions of the city break the spirit and smother any kind of creativity in these little children. They will die a small death, not a heroic one. Instead of a reward, they will eat dust and instead of being fulfilled, they will die empty-hearted. There is no mention of justice, reward or punishment; it is not a matter of ethics but of chance. They will die without love and affection—all this “for a handful of pay on a few Saturday nights.” They will be without hope, dreams, or dignity. Nothing exists beyond the walls within which they toil! How unlike the “great deaths,” the sublime thundering falls of the ancient heroes. “Dust” and “empty-hearted” also hint at sterility. The fertile life-giving powers of the sun and dew have been removed. Many motifs intertwine in this poem to create a mosaic of city life.

“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.

(5-6)

Another poem relates the loneliness of the small death and the rapidity with which the dead are forgotten.

“GRAVES”

I dreamed one man stood against a thousand,
One man damned as a wrongheaded fool.
One year and another as he walked the streets
And a thousand shrugs and boots
Met him in the shoulders and mouths he passed.
          He died alone
And only the caretaker came to his funeral.
.....          Flowers and the wind,
Flowers anod over the graves of the dead,
Petals of red, leaves of yellow, streaks of white,
Masses of purple sagging …
I love you and your great way of forgetting.

(43-44)

In a poem already mentioned under the “innocent child” motif, “The Right to Grief,” the child of the stockyards hunky also dies a small death. Her family is so economically depressed that they cannot even feel sorrow for their own child. The child, therefore, does not have the dignity of dying in her parents' love and calm presence. “They are glad it is gone for the rest of the family now will have more to eat and wear.” (12-13)

Death becomes a routine mechanical business in the poem, “To Certain Journeymen.” The efficiency with which the body is buried is emphasized thereby heightening the fact that other considerations are absent. The dead merely provide the undertakers, hearse drivers and grave diggers with jobs. In fact, the work is often done in laughter. It is obvious that death is no longer considered to be a hallowed and sacred occurrence—one that should be treated with respect and awe. The tone of the poem is flippant, matter-of-fact and lucidly absurd. The dead bodies become like inert objects on an assembly line.

You handle dust going to a long country,
You know the secret behind your job is the same whether you lower the coffin with modern automatic machinery, well-oiled and noiseless, or whether the body is laid in by naked hands and then covered by the shovels.
Your day's work is done with laughter many days of the year,
And you earn a living by those who say good-by in thin whispers.

(19)

It is also a small death that comes to those who are weary of living or to those who no longer function at optimum level and hence are useless to society. The poet strips the individual, his life and death of any dignity and importance whatsoever by comparing it to the life and death of a mechanical object—a clock. Just as the clock is discarded and given to the junkman when it no longer performs its one function of telling correct time, so too the human being is disregarded when he can no longer work efficiently in the industrialized urban environment. Often he too will have had only one skill or function in the complex process; if it is replaced by a machine, there will be no need for him. The value of a human being is equated with his productivity. Again there is no mention of any higher values, ethical or social, beyond the immediate, expedient and concrete. Thought and reflection are meaningless and unnecessary in a mechanistic environment. Hence, death too is viewed not as an abstract phenomenon or from a religious and philosophical point of view but as one more insignificant bothersome routine. Just as the “bum clock“is soon forgotten, so too the fate of the individual will be oblivion.

I am glad God saw Death
And gave Death a job taking care of all who are tired of living:
When all the wheels in a clock are worn and slow and the connections loose
And the clock goes on ticking and telling the wrong time from hour to hour
And people around the house joke about what a bum clock it is,
How glad the clock is when the big Junk Man drives his wagon
Up to the house and puts his arms around the clock and says:
“You don't belong here,
You gotta come
Along with me.”
How glad the clock is then, when it feels the arms of the Junk
Man close around it and carry it away.

(“The Junk Man,” 75-76)

“Keep away from the little deaths,” Carl Sandburg warns in “Joy.” A person should clutch every joy in life and die in the same way. He advises us to lead an exciting adventurous life with laughter and song. Even if you are crushed by a terrible love, you are still experiencing a profound and powerful emotion. The death to be avoided is a dull, routine, monotonous kind of existence—a living death. “Let joy kill you!”

“JOY”

                    Let a joy keep you.
Reach out your hands
And take it when it runs by,
As the Apache dancer
Clutches his woman
.....Joy always,
Joy everywhere—
Let joy kill you!
Keep away from the little deaths.

(51)

Finally, there is yet another type of small death, one that is considered unheroic, undignified and devoid of any religious sanction, at least in our American culture. That is suicide. Sandburg underlines the lack of grandeur and dignity in this type of death by placing his character, Chamfort, in a comic light. He is so ridiculous that he succeeds only in mutilating himself and then spends many years idly drinking coffee, laughing, and chatting. His name is indicative of his character (sham meaning pretense, falseness; fort—from fortis, meaning brave or courageous; forte, fortitude). That this condition is widespread may be noted by the fact that he is a sample. “Chamfort” is also related to the preceding poem by emphasizing that living a meaningless life is truly a death in itself—perhaps even more unheroic than suicide. He did not know how to die because he did not know how to live.

There's Chamfort. He's a sample.
Locked himself in his library with a gun,
Shot off his nose and shot out his right eye.
And this Chamfort knew how to write
And thousands read his books on how to live,
But he himself didn't know
How to die by force of his own hand—see?

(19)

It is difficult to ascertain Sandburg's personal attitude toward death apart from that expressed in his poetry. Some critics have defined the following ideas:

Death is to him no curse, no token of divine anger, no fruit of human sin; it is the gateway to a wonderland, the beginning of a great adventure for which man ever yearns, the opening of the possibility through which the ultimate destiny of the soul will be attained. …

The human personality is sacred; it is not dissolved in death; it comes into its full development beyond the portals of death.⁸

There is a hint in the poem, “Loam,” that the poet might perhaps find some consolation in the eternal cycle.⁹ Later, in “Good Morning America,” he voices a still more optimistic note:

Individually, “Death the Sleepwalker” haunts us and makes us ponder; but, if we are sensible, we are willing to accept it as inevitable and not to worry about it. We are too busy with the richness of everday living to be afraid; so we give an optimistic “morning greeting” to everybody and to all our doubts and queries.¹⁰

Therefore, death is a beautiful experience. The time will come when man will see and enjoy the vast wonder of the eternal universe.

Yet, the same poet tells us that this kind of exalted and meaningful death would be impossible in the city. In his Chicago Poems, Carl Sandburg seems to have resigned himself to a hopeless death.¹¹ In the poetry, death becomes the final irony of life—stillness, nothingness. One need only think of “Cool Tombs” where all ends equal and unimportant “in the dust, in the cool tombs” (Cornhuskers, 134). It is precisely because Sandburg's idea of death was so visionary that he was shocked and disappointed when he witnessed the reality of the horrifying and meaningless small deaths in Chicago. His notion of death as adventure and opportunity is once again derived from the transcendental/romantic tradition, which subsequently underwent a profound disillusionment. The continuous development of personality after death is an extension of Emerson's illimitable “I.” These romantic expectations collided so disastrously with the reality of the city that despair and pessimism usually followed.

Despite the horror of the “small death” in the city, there is, however, one thing that can transcend and triumph over it. The dream. In The People, Yes, Sandburg writes that dreams are more powerful than death. (He had already stated this in his forword to Wright's The Dreamer.) Dreams endure beyond mere death.

There are dreams stronger than death.
Men and women die holding these dreams.
Yes, “stronger than death”: let the hammers beat on this slogan.
Let the sea wash its salt against it and the blizzards drive wind and winter at it.
Let the undersea sharks try to break this bronze murmur.
Let the gentle bush dig its root deep and spread upward to split one boulder.

(The People, Yes, 447-48)¹²

Sandburg believed that through the dream, the hopes, and the plans, one could contribute to man's destiny. For the poet, the dream is priceless; it is almost like a luxury which must be stolen. In “Waiting,” the dream spurs man on to action and adventure.

And I will rest and dream and sit on the deck
          Watching the world go by
And take my pay for many hard days gone I remember.
I will choose what clouds I like
In the great white fleets that wander the blue
As I lie on my back or loaf at the rail.
Tomorrow we move in the gaps and heights
On changing floors of unlevel seas
And no man shall stop us and no man follow
For ours is the quest of an unknown shore.

(66-67)

Dreams live on after death. Despite the terrifying scene on the battlefield in “Among the Red Guns,” the dreams will go on.

Soft amid the blood and crying—
In all your hearts and heads
Among the guns and saddles and muzzles:
                    Dreams
Dreams go on,
Out of the dead on their backs,
Broken and no use any more:
Dreams of the way and the end go on.

(37)

Harboring such romantic and visionary ideas about dreams, Sandburg was quite naturally disillusioned with life in the city. He had anticipated the city to be a place where hopes and dreams, no matter how fantastic, could be realized. Instead, he discovered that dreams are crushed in the city; hopes and plans are thwarted and distorted. They are too delicate to survive in such a stark and aesthetically naked atmosphere. This idea is repeated in so many poems that I have designated it as a separate and distinct motif—called the “deferred dream” motif.

How many young actors and actresses come each year to Broadway and could chime in agreement with Sandburg on the following poem called “Broadway”?

I shall never forget you, Broadway
Your golden and calling lights.
.....Hearts that know you hate you
And lips that have given you laughter
Have gone to their ashes of life and its roses,
Cursing the dreams that were lost
In the dust of your harsh and trampled stones.

(69)

It is not only Broadway that is disillusioning; all life in the city is dream-breaking. In “Passers-By,” the poet describes the passing masses that are hungry for life, love and hope. And yet, they will remain starved—their wishes unfulfilled.

Passers-by,
I remember lean ones among you,
Throats in the clutch of a hope,
Lips written over with strivings,
Mouths that kiss only for love,
Records of great wishes slept with,
                    Held long
And prayed and toiled for.

(7)

Mamie was a typical girl from a little Indiana town who had dreams “of romance and big things off somewhere the way the railroad trains all ran.” Her romantic expectations evaporated in the reality of Chicago.

She has a job now at six dollars a week in the basement of the Boston Store
And even now she beats her head against the bars in the same old way and wonders if there is a bigger place the railroads run to from Chicago where maybe there is
                              romance
                              and big things
                              and real dreams
                              that never go smash.

(17)

For some, life patterns itself into a series of broken dreams. Instead of an evening filled with the afterglow of the day's successes, “Tears and loss and broken dreams / May find your heart at dusk.” (65)

What happens to an individual when his wishes and dreams are deferred too long? First, feelings of frustration, anger and unworthiness develop. If these are prolonged, eventually a sense of apathy will appear and finally, sensations of numbness and complete stagnation descends on the person or group. For example, the people on the “Halsted Street Car” with empty faces are said to be “Tired of wishes, / Empty of dreams.” (7) Their dreams have been crushed so often by the monotony of their existence that they no longer even bother to formulate or weave any dreams or plans. According to Sandburg, they have therefore lost the last weapon with which to surmount or at least to cope with the banality of their lives. Once a person has yielded his dream, he loses the last vestige of his identity. From that point, the descent into a completely mechanized existence is rapid.

In all of these highly charged and intense poems, we are fortunate in hearing from a truly great poet who has been an observant and sympathetic witness to difficult times and to a complex city struggling with its own bulk and teeming humanity. In many ways, his voice echoes major themes in American writing of the first thirty years of this century.

A “defeated artist soul crying out against these … huge ugly buildings that he has to pass day by day, the output of a purely utilitarian age that has no beauty, no joy in it,” Sandburg also saw himself as an agonized poet-citizen protesting “against stifled needlessly defeated lives.” His poems were efforts to combat limitations of both sorts. Like Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, and others he was seeking imaginative and spiritual alternatives to what he found to be so barren in the urban and human landscape.¹³

We might well, at this point, question the actual nature of Carl Sandburg's reaction to the city as portrayed in the Chicago Poems. Why does he use these motifs? From where do they arise? Are they original with Sandburg? Part of the answer has already been provided by implications and brief statements made in the discussion of the various motifs. They are deeply imbedded in the roots of the Romantic and Naturalistic tradition.

The poet's expectations of the city were so high and idealistic that disappointment with its reality was inevitable. Yet, it was not merely Sandburg's notions of the city which were romantic. This alone would not have caused such an intense and vehement outcry. His very nature was romantic and idealistic; virtually all of his beliefs and attitudes toward life had a tone of intense, but exultant, dedication.

His basically idealistic personality already manifested itself at a young age. It was probably the reason why he rejected fraternity membership at college and instead organized a club for non-fraternity students.¹⁴ Throughout his life, he would always see people in a vision of unity, harmony and equality.

As to what was the most detestable word in the English language, Sandburg, said that it was the word “exclusive.” When you are exclusive, he added, “you shut out a more or less large range of humanity from your mind and heart—from your understanding of them.”¹⁵

While a student at Lombard College, he wrote frequent essays and editorials which already revealed idealistic socialistic leanings. (His socialism also had a messianic visionary quality about it.) The following is an excellent example defining Sandburg's early social philosophy as well as his sense of humor.

As editing manger of The Cannibal [the college annual], he placed on one of the pages picturing faculty dignitaries a picture of that sometimes overlooked and necessary campus citizen, the janitor.¹⁶

Of idealism itself, he stated: “I am an idealist. I can see humanity blundering on toward some splendid goal. … I am an idealist. I don't know where I'm going but I'm on my way.”¹⁷

The poet's belief in the infinite worth of the individual and his illimitable capacities has already been mentioned. Yet, since Sandburg thought that man was innately good, it also follows that evil and corruption exist not in him but in society and its institutions. He believed that it is the corrupt nature of the social “system” which warps and destroys man's nature and creates havoc in his cities. Man is not to blame. Therefore, if only social ills could be corrected, there would be no further problems.

Sandburg was especially interested in the common individual and felt that even the source of leadership should be derived from the common mass of men.¹⁸

The great man, the rare, strong, splendid individual who gives the world some great thought, some great action, something of use, beauty, or inspiration, comes up from the mob, springs from the vast mass of nameless, unknown individuals …¹⁹

He was always able to see beauty and worth in the commonplace, such as the dago shovel man, the accordion maker or the crowd of Hungarian families along the Desplaines River. We should notice, however, that he emphasizes the “mass of men” and “the mob.” This stems from the naturalistic tradition as does his portrayal of the individual as helpless victim—swallowed up in the city. As an individual alone, a person is powerless to fight the forces pitted against him. Only in external mass action would he perhaps find his salvation. Gone is the staunch, rugged “divine” man of Emerson who was capable of anything if he would but draw on his inner resources.

Nevertheless, ideas which Sandburg did share with the romantics include the supremacy of emotion over logic—“there are depths of life that logic cannot sound. It takes feeling.”²⁰ The importance of evaluating and judging phenomena via the senses rather than by reason is also stressed. In “Good Morning, America,” he argues: “We feel and see a thing before we study and explain it. Vision precedes analysis. That is why poets are as important as scientists.”²¹

Learning through experience is much more valuable than learning through books or via any other type of formal education. Experience may be either positive or negative. We tend to recall pleasant experiences more easily but people also learn crucial facts of life by painful experiences, disappointments and betrayals. The present is a better teacher than the past which the poet called “a bucket of ashes.” Trust not books, newspapers and lawyers, Sandburg advises us, but go into nature and probe your own feelings. In the Chicago Poems, he voices all these sentiments, finally questioning the existence of “truth” itself.

“ON THE WAY”

Little one, you have been buzzing in the books,
Flittering in the newspapers and drinking beer with lawyers
And amid the educated men of the clubs you have been getting
          an earful of speech from trained tongues.
Take an earful from me once, go with me on a hike
Along sand stretches on the great inland sea here
And while the eastern breeze blows on us and the restless surge
Of the lake waves on the breakwater breaks with an ever fresh monotone,
Let us ask ourselves: What is truth? what do you or I know?
How much do the wisest of the world's men know about
          where the massed human procession is going?
You have heard the mob laughed at?
I ask you: Is not the mob rough as the mountains are rough?
And all things human rise from the mob and relapse
          and rise again as rain to the sea?

(28)

Does absolute truth exist? Transcendental belief is relative; it has no absolutes. Dichotomies and contradictions dissolve in its misty vision of unity. Any and every truth is valid. Sandburg came to this conclusion many times.

I am a ready liar in a good cause and will bicker until the cows come home on the question of whether there is any absolute truth expressible.²²

In Joseffy: An Appreciation, Sandburg even went so far as to advocate the necessities of illusion to lighten life's harsh realities.²³ Perhaps Sandburg comes closest to the truth in his “massed human processions.”

The staunch individualist was often disdainful of convention, not hesitating to vent his own uniqueness and eccentricity. This was especially true with regard to his manner of dress and etiquette.

Surely, there was an insatiable romantic in him, as his writing soon proved and as his life-long projection of his image of himself as poet affirmed. (One of his acquaintances recalled years later, how, as a famous old poet waiting in the wings to go on for a reading, he carefully mussed his hair and brought that wayward lock down over his forehead before taking to the stage.)²⁴

He often developed close relationships to certain places where he had given readings. One of these was Cornell College, a small college in Iowa, to which he returned sixteen times, often turning down more lucrative engagements.

In the depth of the depression, when his appearance was to be cancelled because the students had no money, he went anyway and charged nothing.

On his first visit, a girl admirer was ill and could not attend his performance. So the poet went to her instead, repeated the whole program for her in her dormitory bedroom. She became his friend, of course, and so did the plain dirt farmer, a man named Wooder, who in the twenty years has never missed Sandburg's performance at the college, driving in thirty miles to listen excitedly to the readings, pumping Sandburg's hand afterward, sitting the rest of the night with him, talking, listening.²⁵

On the other hand, Sandburg's mistrust of the conventional and respectable middle class is obvious in his response to the college graduating class who had requested a statement from him for their annual. “Beware of respectable people. Don't be afraid of your dreams. Remember all original work is laughed at to begin with.”²⁶ Later he wished that he had written the first part thus:

Beware of respectable people; beware of crooks, but of all crooks beware of the respectable, beware of snobs, and especially middle-class snobs; beware of people who are perfectly grammatical; beware of culture hounds; beware of people who let their thinking be done for them and don't know it.²⁷

In essence, Sandburg believed that man thrived best not in society but in nature, coming close to the Emersonian ideal in his attitudes. (Emerson had always been one of Sandburg's favorite writers.) To Reuben Borough, he writes: “You mention the probability of your being on a farm. On the land a man is safe and comes nearer being one soul and body than anywhere else under present conditions.”²⁸ He gives his wife similar advice: “Take lots of sun and wind for yours, Girl—lots of the big open—Big simple thoughts and big simple glories are yours. Keep them fresh for Paula's sake and for Carl.”²⁹ Sandburg diverts from Transcendentalism, however, since his desire to go out “into nature” was largely an escapist phenomenon. He wanted to get away from the city. He had no intention or hope of bringing the lessons he learned in nature back to the city for application—as did Emerson and Thoreau.

Sandburg also envisioned nature as a religious phenomenon. Disliking any kind of organized religion, he made the natural world his church and priest.

I went to church yesterday and listened to a goddam oleaginous preacher deliver that old stale discourse I have heard forty times about the conversion of Saul of Tarsus. … Then I went to a ballgame—poor playing but it was sincere and therefore refreshing. Then I went out in the woods and meditated whether a little woodpecker issuing from its egg and surveying the world from the top of a walnut tree would come in the category of an Immaculate Conception.³⁰

Since he felt that man is best in nature, Sandburg extended this romantic notion also to the solving of social problems. For example, he rather naively believed that “being in nature” would solve the immigration problem. Yet he ignored the immigrants' many other problems, such as a language barrier, unemployment, or lack of skills.

A little East is a settlement of Italians who have made the sandy wastes smile in a way that makes me think the immigration problem can be solved. To the woods and the fields and the open air with them, where old-world appendages can disintegrate.³¹

According to Sandburg, the simple life of nature could even have cured Byron's melancholy. No task is too great.

Time—Byron called it the tomb-builder—but Byron never knew anything but the pleasure of being sad. If he could have held potatoes and built wood sheds part of his time, he would have dashed down yon Samian cup of sweet melancholy.³²

Generally speaking, Sandburg gloried in the simple life, in the life of the common man, in the life of the soil. “My eyes range with pleasure over flowers, prairies, woods, grass, and running water, and the sea, and the sky and the clouds.”³³

It was not merely nature that he loved so very much but specifically the American landscape. Sandburg had an unshakable faith in America's greatness and in her future. Even when the country was devoid of hope and energy after the Great Depression, Sandburg wrote The People, Yes. In this book, he praised the qualities of “the people”—dignity, toughness, humor—all of which resounded in a chorus of hope and optimism.³⁴ He maintained the staunch belief that the people had within them the possibility of achieving all things. When asked to report on the state of the nation, Sandburg replied while tuning his guitar:

Working through this Lincoln stuff all these years has made me feel better about this country. I don't think we're going to crack up. … It's hard to put into words without making it sound like whistling in a graveyard, but what I mean is that, when you know a few thousand real American songs, you begin to understand that there is something unique and mysterious in this country that's going to make it come through all right.³⁵

He retained this optimism throughout his life. His romantic vision indeed seems to be indestructible. It is at once admirable and yet at the same time somewhat frightening.

I have spent as strenuous a life as any surviving three wars and two major depressions, but never, not for a moment did I lose faith in America's future. Time and time again, I saw the faces of her men and women torn and shaken in turmoil, chaos and storm. In each major crisis, I have seen despair on the faces of some of the foremost strugglers, but their ideas always won. Their visions always came through.

I see America, not in the setting sun of a black night of despair ahead of us. I see America in the crimson light of a rising sun fresh from the burning, creative hand of God. I see great days ahead, great days possible to men and women of will and vision.³⁶

Sandburg states this victory of the indomitable human spirit over adversity in two magnificent lines of poetry.

The people so peculiar in renewals and comeback,
You can't laugh off their capacity to take it.

(615)

Is it, therefore, surprising that this poet—so dedicated, so naive, so idealistic, so close to the soil—should be shocked and disillusioned by the reality he discovered in Chicago? I think not. How could he possibly reconcile his simplistic romantic beliefs with the grim realism of the city? How did he maintain his visionary outlook? Let us look more closely at Sandburg's complete response to Chicago. Why did he stay so long? What influence did the city exert on his creative life and why?

Sandburg's profound disillusionment with the city where “dreams go smash” was clearly expressed in his Chicago Poems. The reaction here was vehement and intense because the hopes and dreams had been equally so. The expectations had soared high so the fall was great. The poet repeatedly attacked the city with mixed feelings of love, hate, fear, and anger. Were there any effects?

In rejecting the city and its reality, Sandburg was periodically able to vent the negative emotions that overwhelmed him and consumed so much of his emotional and imaginative energy. This then allowed him to use his psychic energy in finding positive solutions to Chicago's problem, hence his extensive work for the Socialist Party. Moreover, hurling his criticism at the city enabled him to cope with the reality of the city in a healthy and constructive way. His verbal outbursts may also have been a psychological safety valve necessary for him to release the emotions that might otherwise have been harmful to his mental well-being.

The fierce rejections of the city, were they verbal or actual, also invested Sandburg with a special kind of moral energy that allowed him to continue in his search for aesthetic ideals and truth. He wanted to keep his romantic ideas alive and strong. As we have seen, he never yielded the hope that things “could be better” and that, someday, they would be. Perhaps this is why he wandered so extensively about the United States. To be sure, the criticism he lashed out against the city was a reverse energy—a kind of negative energy—but it gave him the strength to go on, at a time when it was depressing and difficult to do so; it persuaded him to continue to write poetry as well as practical pamphlets on social problems, and most of all, it challenged him to attempt new possibilities in all areas at a time when many others were afraid to do so.

To meet this end, Chicago offered variety, complexity and contradiction, options, and above all, these possibilities of growth and change. Frequently, the attitude expressed toward the city is also indicative of the poet's attempt to achieve and adapt to the complexity of full maturity. Living in the big metropolis acquainted him with an endless variety of social classes and ethnic groups as well as with their values, customs and speech. For example, Sandburg was known to stand on the street corners and to write down verbatim the wry jokes from Skid Row.³⁷ The Chicago milieu also served to increase the range of his language and music, a factor which profoundly affected the power of his poetry and stimulated his writing of the famous Songbag. The latter is the collection of the words and music of 300 American folk ballads. On the other hand, the human misery and suffering he saw in the city compelled him to write about their plight. Actually, this was his main reason for writing at all. Finally, Chicago also taught him what it really meant to be a poet. His statement, “Poets cry their heart out. If they don't they ain't poets” should be sufficient proof.³⁸

Chicago showered its poet with dreams, which, as we have already discussed, are vital and necessary for artistic inspiration and stimulus. Chicago never faltered in its ability to attract him to fill him with awe. Occasionally, the city beckoned with illusionary veils. The poet describes the thrill which anticipation of the urban center instilled in him.

All ready for the trip to Chi again by boat. This is the fifth time I have made this trip—each time marking varied epochs. And never was life bigger both with clash and conflict, but with the fine lure of beauty and far stars. …

—I look with four eyes—I have twice as many wonderful dreams—and a strange new pair of hands that someway is not so strange and now fumbles around my head and cuffs me and thrills me with little touches—³⁹

Chicago's magnetic powers continued to attract Carl Sandburg throughout his long life. As late as 1957 when he was 79 years old, the city leprechaun still felt the desire to return to Chicago and participate in its affairs. He went to the midwestern metropolis for the Chicago Association of Commerce and Industry to help promote Chicago Dynamic Week. At this time The Sandburg Range, an anthology of his writings, was published. The comment he made referring to the collections was significant in explaining his lifelong relationship with the big city. He said that he would not have written so much about Chicago “if I had not loved Chicago as Victor Hugo loved his Paris, as Charles Lamb loved his London.”⁴⁰

The following poem written by the Poet Laureate of Chicago, Carl Sandburg, appeared in Poetry, April, 1917. Perhaps it will reveal in poetry what I have taken many pages to explain.⁴¹

“CHICAGO POET”

I saluted a nobody.
I saw him in a looking glass.
He smiled—so did I
He crumpled the skin of his forehead,
                    frowning—so did I.
Everything I did he did.
I said, “Hello, I know you”
And I was a liar to say so.
Ah, this looking-glass man!
Liar, fool, dreamer, play-actor,
Soldier, dusty drinker of dust—
Ah! he will go with me.
Down the dark stairway
When nobody else is looking
When everybody else is gone.
His locks his elbow in mine.
I lose all—but not him.

The poet fades quietly into the night. But we will not escape him. Like Whitman, Sandburg would say:

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place scarch another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.(42)

Notes

1. Quotations from Carl Sandburg's poetry are taken from The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich Co., Inc., 1970. The page number appears in the parenthesis following the poem.

2. Joseph Haas and Gene Lovitz, Carl Sandburg: A Pictorial Biography (New York: G. B. Putnam's Sons, 1967), p. 68.

3. North Callahan, Carl Sandburg: The Lincoln of our Literature (New York: New York University Press, 1970), p. 2.

4. Herbert Mitgang (ed.), The Letters of Carl Sandburg (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968), p. 14. (Letter to Professor Philip Green White, June 22, 1903.)

5. Callahan, op. cit., p. 80.

6. Ibid. Another reader suggested that “a trip to Rootabaga Country should be an annual pilgrimage if one wants to keep his spirits young and buoyant.” Ibid.

7. Carl Sandburg, Always the Young Strangers (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1952), p. 204. This is a colorful, delightful-to-read, although often sad autobiography of Carl Sandburg's earliest years. The book begins with his birth, recounts his earliest boyish pranks, his earliest learning experiences while providing a broad panorama of immigrant Swedish life in America. Always the Young Strangers also gives a visual background for midwestern life in general, especially the political and economic scene and major events that Sandburg remembers well, such as the funeral of U.S. Grant, the Panic of 1893 and the first voyage of Robert Fulton's steamboat.

8. E. Gustav Johnson, “Religion in the Poetry of Carl Sandburg,” Prairie Schooner, 24 (Winter, 1950), pp. 345 and 347.

9. Gay Wilson Allen, Carl Sandburg, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1972), p. 23.

10. Richard Crowder, Carl Sandburg (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1964).

11. Charles H. Compton, “Who Reads Carl Sandburg?” South Atlantic Quarterly, 28 (April, 1929), p. 197.

12. Carl Sandburg, The People, Yes in The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovitch Co., Inc., 1970), pp. 447-48.

13. William Alexander, “The Limited American, The Great Loneliness, and the Singing Fire: Carl Sandburg's ‘Chicago Poems,’” American Literature 45 (March, 1973), p. 71. This article contains an interesting and informative socio-historical commentary. It perceptively places the meaning of Sandburg's work in context with similar viewpoints on culture expressed by the other great poets of this era, such as Eliot, Pound, Williams and Stevens.

14. Haas, op. cit., p. 64.

15. Callahan, op. cit., p. 215.

16. Alan Jenkins, “Portrait of a Poet at College“, South Atlantic Quarterly 49 (October, 1950), p. 481.

17. Crowder, op. cit., p. 36.

18. Soviet readers were quick to notice Sandburg's championing of the working class. (Sandburg visited the Soviet Union in 1959.) On the occasion of the 90th anniversary of his birth, Soviet critic Anna Martynova writes: “The death of the outstanding American poet Carl Sandburg was a great loss for world culture. The Soviet people mourn for the poet who represented the best humanitarian traditions in American literature … From his works the reader can grasp the image of the American working man and learn of his life and struggle, his joys and sorrows (“Carl Sandburg and the Soviet Reader,” Soviet Literature 1 (1968), p. 192).

19. Crowder, op. cit., p. 35.

20. Allen, op. cit., p. 8.

21. Crowder, op. cit., p. 35.

22. Mitgang, op. cit., p. 54. (Letter to Reuben Borough, November 11, 1907.)

23. Haas, op. cit., p. 69.

24. Ibid., p. 67.

25. Karl Detzer, Carl Sandburg: A Study in Personality and Background (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1941), p. 154.

26. Haas, op. cit., p. 97.

27. Ibid.

28. Mitgang, op. cit., p. 54. (Letter to Reuben Borough, November 6, 1907.)

29. Ibid., p. 87. (Letter to Paula Sandburg, June 7, 1909.)

30. Ibid., p. 48. (Letter to Reuben W. Borough, June 9, 1907.)

31. Ibid., p. 12. (Letter to Professor Wright, June 22, 1903.)

32. Ibid., p. 25. (Letter to Professor Wright, February 17, 1904.)

33. Crowder, op. cit., pp. 34-35.

34. Even his massive six volume biography of Lincoln was accused of being “romantic.” There were, of course, touches of pure romanticism, such as his treatment of the Ann-Rutledge-Lincoln love relationship. It was romantic also in the sense that Sandburg tried to create a universal truth about Lincoln rather than specific points of accuracy. “He was creating—or rather, solidifying—an American myth, he was not writing history for schoolroom and study.” Crowder, op. cit., p. 96.

    The harshest criticism came from Edmund Wilson who bitterly denounced Sandburg's biography of Lincoln (without distinguishing the Prairie Years from the War Years) as “romantic and sentimental rubbish.” In Patriotic Gore he says, “There are moments when one is tempted to feel that the cruellest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth has been to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.” Allen, op. cit., p. 29.

35. Callahan, op. cit., p. 109.

36. Carl Sandburg in the Ashenville Citizen Times, January 5, 1953 (quoted in Callahan, op. cit., p. 240).

37. Dan G. Hoffman, “Sandburg and ‘The People.’” Antioch Review 10 (June, 1950) p. 27.

38. Detzer, op. cit., p. 150.

39. Mitgang, op. cit., p. 70. (Letter to Lillian Paula Steichen, May 9, 1908.

40. Haas, op. cit., p. 165.

41. Carl Sandburg, “Chicago Poet” (poem), Poetry 10 (April, 1917), p. 101.

42. Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself” in Leaves of Grass (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962), p. 77.