outline_us_lit

the quiet poverty, loneliness, and despair insmall-town America.THE “CHICAGO SCHOOL” OF POETRYhree Midwestern poets who grew up inIllinois and shared the midwestern concernwith ordinary people are Carl Sandburg,Vachel Lindsay, and Edgar Lee Masters. Theirpoetry often concerns obscure individuals; theydeveloped techniques — realism, dramatic renderings— that reached out to a larger readership.They are part of the Midwestern, or ChicagoSchool, that arose before World War I to challengethe East Coast literary establishment. The“Chicago Renaissance” was a watershed inAmerican culture: It demonstrated that America’sinterior had matured.TEdgar Lee Masters (1868-1950)By the turn of the century, Chicago had becomea great city, home of innovative architecture andcosmopolitan art collections. Chicago was alsothe home of Harriet Monroe’s Poetry, the mostimportant literary magazine of the day.Among the intriguing contemporary poets thejournal printed was Edgar Lee Masters, authorof the daring Spoon River Anthology (1915),with its new “unpoetic” colloquial style, frankpresentation of sex, critical view of village life,and intensely imagined inner lives of ordinarypeople.Spoon River Anthology is a collection of portraitspresented as colloquial epitaphs (wordsfound inscribed on gravestones) summing up thelives of individual villagers as if in their ownwords. It presents a panorama of a country villagethrough its cemetery: 250 people buriedthere speak, revealing their deepest secrets.Many of the people are related; members ofabout 20 families speak of their failures anddreams in free-verse monologues that are surprisinglymodern.Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)A friend once said, “Trying to write brieflyabout Carl Sandburg is like trying to picture theGrand 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 byprofession, he wrote a massive biography ofAbraham Lincoln that is one of the classic worksof the 20th century.To many, Sandburg was a latter-day WaltWhitman, writing expansive, evocative urban andpatriotic poems and simple, childlike rhymes andballads. He traveled about reciting and recordinghis poetry, in a lilting, mellifluously toned voicethat was a kind of singing. At heart he was totallyunassuming, notwithstanding his national fame.What he wanted from life, he once said, was “tobe out of jail...to eat regular..to get what I writeprinted,...a little love at home and a little niceaffection hither and yon over the American landscape,...(and)to sing every day.”A fine example of his themes and hisWhitmanesque style is the poem “Chicago”(1914):Hog Butcher for the World,Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,Player with Railroads and theNation’s Freight Handler;Stormy, husky, brawling,City of the Big Shoulders...Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931)Vachel Lindsay was a celebrant of small-townmidwestern 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 Christiangospel songs and vaudeville (popular theater) onthe one hand, and advanced modernist poeticson the other. An extremely popular public readerin his day, Lindsay’s readings prefigure “Beat”56