Chicago by Carl Sandburg; an analysis of his poem and some biographical information.

"Chicago," written Carl Sandburg is a rousing piece of writing about the lives of people in Chicago and about the city as a whole. In 1894, Carl Sandburg's father, a laborer in the railroad yards of a small Illinois prairie town, secured a pass for his son to see Chicago. The enormous vitality of the city, as well as its economic injustices, left a deep impression on the young man that would emerge later in his …

…the defiant, brawling laughter of the ignorant prizefighter drunk with his own power. This is Sandburg's vision of Chicago, a defiant, almost mythological entity that offers both deliverance and pain to humankind. It is a vision presented in a fiercely-toned poem, a tone which matches the city's animal fury and rabid hunger for progress, for Sandburg's Chicago is "Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness."