THE "CHICAGO SCHOOL" OF POETRY

Three Midwestern poets who grew up in Illinois and shared the Midwestern concern  with ordinary people are Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, and Edgar Lee Masters ,Edwin Arlington Robinson. Their poetry often concerns obscure individuals; They developed techniques-realism, dramatic renderings-that reached out to a larger readership. They are part of the Midwestern, or Chicago, School that arose before World War I to challenge the East Coast literary establishment. The "Chicago Renaissance" was a watershed in American culture: It demonstrated that America's interior had matured. 

Edgar Lee MASTERS :(1868-1950)

By the turn of the century, Chicago had become a great city, home of innovative architecture and  cosmopolitan art collections. Chicago was also the home of Harriet Monroe's Poetry, the most important literary magazine of the day.

Among the intriguing contemporary poets the journal printed was Edgar Lee Masters, author of the daring "Spoon River Anthology"  (1915), with its new "unpoetic" colloquial style, frank presentation of sex, critical view of village life and intensely imagined inner lives of ordinary people.

"Spoon River Anthology" is a collection of portraits presented as colloquial  epitaphs (words found inscribed on gravestones) summing up the lives of individual villagers as if in their own words. It presents a panorama of a country village through its cemetery: 250 people buried there speak, revealing their deepest secrets. Many of the people are related; members of about twenty families speak of their failures and dreams in free verse monologues that are surprisingly modern.

Carl SANDBURG:(1878-1967)

A friend once said, "Trying to write briefly about Carl Sandburg is like trying to picture the Grand Canyon in one black-and-white snapshot." Poet, historian, biographer, novelist, musician, essayist- Sandburg, son of a railroad blacksmith, was all of these and more. A journalist by profession, he wrote a massive biography of Abraham Lincoln that is one of the classic works of the 20th century.

To many, Sandburg was a latter-day Walt Whitman, writing expansive, evocative, urban and patriotic poems and simple, childlike, rhymes and ballads. He traveled about reciting and recording his poetry, in a lilting, mellifluously toned voice that was a kind of singing. At heart he was totally unassuming, notwithstanding his national fame. What he wanted from life, he once said, was "to be out of jail...to eat regular...to get what I write printed,...a little love at home and a little nice affection hither and yon over the American landscape,...(and ) to sing every day."

A fine example of  his themes and his Whitmanesque style is the poem "Chicago" (1914):

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...

He points a picture of Chicago City as a person ,as if the city were a man with big shoulders. He depicts the city  like a worker who works with just his physical power. He depicts the city as a proud and strong human. He relies on his physical power and he is proud of  being a worker.

Vachel LINDSAY: (1879-1931)

Vachel Lindsay was a celebrant of small-town Midwestern populism and creator of strong, rhythmic poetry designed to be declaimed  aloud. His work forms a curious link between the popular or folk, forms of poetry, such as Christian gospel songs and vaudeville (popular theater) on the one hand, and advanced  modernist poetics on the other. An extremely popular public reader in his day, Lindsay's reading prefigure "Beat" poetry readings of the post-World War II era that were accompanied by jazz.

To popularize poetry, Lindsay developed what he called a "higher vaudeville,"  using music and strong rhythm. Racist by today's standards, his famous poem "The Congo" (1914) celebrates the history of Africans by mingling jazz, poetry, music, and chanting. At the same time he immortalized such figures on the American landscape as Abraham Lincoln (" Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight") and John Chapman ("Johnny Appleseed"), often blending facts with myth.

Edwin Arlington ROBINSON:(1869-1935)

Edwin A. Robinson is the best U.S. poet of the late nineteenth century. Like Edgar Lee Masters, he is known for short, ironic character studies of ordinary individuals. Unlike Masters, Robinson uses traditional metrics. Robinson's imaginary Tilburry Town, like Masters' Spoon River, contains lives of quiet desperation.

Some of the best known of Robinson's dramatic works are "Luke Havergal" (1896), a forsaken lover; "Miniver Cheevy" (1910), A portrait of a romantic dreamer; and  "Richard Cory" (1896), a somber portrait of a wealthy man who commits suicide.