Chicago

By Carl Sandburg*

Hog Butcher for the World,
   Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
   Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
   Stormy, husky, brawling,
   City of the Big Shoulders:
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.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
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.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
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,
   Bareheaded,
   Shoveling,
   Wrecking,
   Planning,
   Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, 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.
Source: Poetry (March 1914)

*Carl Sandburg's Biography
1878--1967

Adopted the socialist views of his mentor before leaving school in his senior year.

Sandburg sold stereoscope views and wrote poetry for two years before his first book of verse, In Reckless Ecstasy, was printed on Wright's basement press in 1904.

Wright printed two more volumes for Sandburg, Incidentals (1907) and The Plaint of a Rose (1908).

As the first decade of the century wore on, Sandburg grew increasingly concerned with the plight of the American worker.

In 1907 he worked as an organizer for the Wisconsin Social Democratic party, writing and distributing political pamphlets and literature.

At party headquarters in Milwaukee, Sandburg met Lilian Steichen, whom he married in 1908.

The responsibilities of marriage and family prompted a career change.

Sandburg returned to Illinois and took up journalism.

For several years he worked as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News, covering mostly labor issues and later writing his own feature.

Sandburg was virtually unknown to the literary world when, in 1914, a group of his poems appeared in the nationally circulated Poetry magazine.

Two years later his book Chicago Poems was published, and the thirty-eight-year-old author found himself on the brink of a career that would bring him international acclaim.

Sandburg published another volume of poems, Cornhuskers, in 1918, and wrote a searching analysis of the 1919 Chicago race riots.

More poetry followed, along with Rootabaga Stories (1922), a book of fanciful children's tales.

That book prompted Sandburg's publisher, Alfred Harcourt, to suggest a biography of Abraham Lincoln for children.

Sandburg researched and wrote for three years, producing not a children's book, but a two-volume biography for adults.

His Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, published in 1926, was Sandburg's first financial success.

He moved to a new home on the Michigan dunes and devoted the next several years to completing four additional volumes, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940.

Sandburg continued his prolific writing, publishing more poems, a novel, Remembrance Rock, a second volume of folk songs, and an autobiography, Always the Young Strangers.

In 1945 the Sandburgs moved with their herd of prize-winning goats and thousands of books to Flat Rock, North Carolina.

Sandburg's Complete Poems won him a second Pulitzer Prize in 1951.

Sandburg died at his North Carolina home July 22, 1967.

His ashes were returned, as he had requested, to his Galesburg birthplace.

In the small Carl Sandburg Park behind the house, his ashes were placed beneath Remembrance Rock, a red granite boulder.

Ten years later the ashes of his wife were placed there.