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.

The poem immediately “roused a storm of protest,” one observer said. Many Chicagoans, as well as conservative readers everywhere, objected to Sandburg’s brutal imagery, while other critics derided as unaesthetic his use of free verse. Nevertheless, two years later, when he published his first book-length volume, Chicago Poems, he used “Chicago” as the title poem. The poems in that book came from Sandburg’s working-class background, his intimate knowledge of urban life based on his years as a journalist, his Socialist views, his belief in social and economic justice, and his faith in the people, “the mob.”

Critical approaches to Sandburg’s work were established early on. William Braithwaite, writing in the Boston Transcript, called Chicago Poems a “book of ill-regulated speech that has neither verse or proper rhythms.” Amy Lowell objected to propagandistic elements in some of the poems but praised the originality of the book. W. A. Bradley, in the Dial, called Sandburg a “rather gross, simple-minded, sentimental” poet who was also a “highly sensitized impressionist who finds in the subtle accords between his own ideal moods and the loveliest, most elusive aspects of the external world, material for delicate and dreamlike expression.”

Sandburg’s early radicalism was tempered in the decades following the publication of Chicago Poems, and by the 1930s his poetry had lost some of its social sting. However, Sandburg himself never lost his social conscience or his Whitmanesque belief in the people, the American mob. After completing his six-volume biography of Lincoln in 1939, Sandburg became a cultural icon. He made appearances across the country reading his poetry and singing folk songs. While his racy and colloquial language never appealed to the academy, his poetry spoke to the masses and was accessible to all who could read. As Archibald MacLeish described it, “There is [in Sandburg’s writing] . . . a tang, a liveliness, a pungency which is native and natural to the American ear.”

Part of Sandburg’s popularity can be attributed to his use of free verse. As he explained in The Sandburg Treasury:

We have heard much in our time about free verse being modern, as though it is a new-found style for men to use in speaking and writing, rising out of the machine age, skyscrapers, high speed and jazz. Now, if free verse is a form of writing poetry without rhyme, without regular meters, without established and formal rules governing it, we can easily go back to the earliest styles of poetry known to the human family—and the style is strictly free verse. Before men invented the alphabet, so that poems could be put down in writing, they spoke their poems. When one man spoke to another in a certain timebeat and rhythm, if it happened that his words conveyed certain impressions and moods to his listeners, he was delivering poetry to them, whether he knew it or they knew it, and whether he or they had a name for an art which the poet was practicing on himself and them.