Sandburg’s poem “Chicago” is self-consciously artless—a brash, assertive statement of place. In 1914, the poem thrust him into national prominence as a modernist poet and image-maker for the laboring class. A rambunctious portrait of a flourishing urban center, the poem makes a vigorous proletarian thrust with its initial images of a butcher, tool maker, harvester, and freight handler. Outside the pre-modern niceties of predictable line lengths and rhyme, the poet ignores scholars and entrepreneurs as he surges toward the city skyline. With crudely forceful, startling figures, he mines the verbal subsoil for the source of Chicago’s raw energy and steadying optimism. He applauds its ample frame, personified as a muscular, essentially male pair of shoulders, but balances his realistic assessment by chastising the urban penchant for vice and crime.
As though addressing an individual, Sandburg personifies the city as a brutal depriver of women and children, who perform a lesser role as victims dependent on man-sized protection and support. He confronts the attacker who would vilify his “alive,” “coarse,” “strong,” and “cunning” city, a “tall bold slugger” of a metropolis. The forces that undergird Chicago’s permanence founder on the edge of honesty and respectability, implying that too much gentility saps a growing nation, depriving it of the underworld heft essential to progress. To further the image of growth, the poet piles up present participles, beginning with a dog lapping and moving briskly through “building, breaking, rebuilding.” With a return to the opening stanza, Sandburg repeats the skills of the burly, uncompromising city, the sources of its might. By its nature, the poem itself becomes one of the enduring homegrown products of America’s “second city.”
A persistent contrast to “Chicago” is “Fog” (1916), which is often a companion piece in anthologies. An American haiku, the poem captures a phenomenon of nature in a second natural image. A feral image of sinuous grace, the diminutive cat shape perches over the skyline before soundlessly creeping away. The silky presence relieves the gathering fog of menace as it unifies the harbor and city streets under one silent, soft-furred cloud. Simple, yet rich in brooding, elusive mysticism, the figure compels the reader to draw conclusions from personal experience with both fog and cats.
In 1918, at the end of World War I, Sandburg produced “Grass,” a savagely realistic, calm poem, more heavily symbolic and less spontaneous than his imagist verse. A familiar theme in world literature, the idea of creeping cemetery grass uniting all wars dates to ancient Mediterranean verse. By speaking through the persona of grass, Sandburg captures the impersonal work of nature: the vivid green blades conceal from passersby the destruction of three wars—Napoleonic battles, the American Civil War, and World War I. By naming cities forever linked to carnage, Sandburg reminds the reader that, once inflicted on humanity, war leaves an indelible history as grass reclaims battle grounds and turns them into burial places. Although veiled by spreading root structure, the events remain in memory, a prologue to subsequent wars.
