How Poetry Is Condensed Prose: Carl Sandburgs Chicago

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How Poetry Is Condensed Prose: Carl Sandburg's Chicago

Poetry is the time old form of expression that allows one to explicate him or herself using very little words. A single poetic line can provoke a variety of emotions and send the reader to another place. Many scholars and English professors will tell you poetry consists of rhyme and meter, form and rhythm. They would be accurate in doing so. However, poetry can also be described as condensed prose that has the ability to induce a plethora of images, emotions, and thoughts into one's mind, as does the poem Chicago by Carl Sandburg.
The poem Chicago by Carl Sandburg offers a great example of how poetry is in fact condensed prose. The poem, published in 1914, tells about the wicked, bareheaded, and husky city of Chicago, Illinois. Rather than sticking to the traditional closed form of poetry, Sandburg's Chicago departs to a more open form that includes some traditional uses of capitalization as well as lines that go along with the natural divisions of phrases and sentences. Instead of using any sort of metrical pattern, Chicago repeats words and phrases, such as They tell me in lines 6-10, to create its form. This poem can be considered condensed prose because it is telling a story of Chicago. One could get just as much, if not more, out of this poem as one would by reading prose about the city.
A major reasons the reader is able to extract so much from poetry is the strong use of imagery, or language that evokes a physical sensation produced by one of the five senses-sight, hearing, taste, touch, or smell (Literature pg. 629). The poem Chicago again provides a great example of this. The mere word Chicago triggers an image in most of our minds. We picture industries and machines because most of us know that Chicago is a large industrial center. The first five lines of Chicago are describing the city. The images that we conjure up in our mind when we hear the phrases, Hog Butcher for the World or Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat are what we are going to associate with the city of Chicago. Sandburg continues to provoke the readers sense of sight as he writes, On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger and Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness. One immediately visualizes hungry women and children a...

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