SOURCE: Brumm, Anne-Marie. “The Cycle of Life: Motifs in the Chicago Poems of Carl Sandburg.” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik: A Quarterly of Language, Literature, and Culture 31, no. 3 (1983): 237-55.

In the following essay, Brumm enumerates leitmotifs—including the innocent child, victimized maiden, and death—in Sandburg's Chicago Poems.

Full of ideals and dreams, Carl Sandburg went to “the big city,” Chicago, for the first time in 1896. He was then only eighteen and his meager money only permitted him to remain three days, yet it was the beginning of a marked change in the young poet. Again and again, “Chi” would lure him to return. Carl Sandburg's response to Chicago was an intense one—one that would influence his entire life. It was also to be an ambivalent one. He loved Chicago, walking its long streets, drinking in its strange sights and basking in its blistering noise. But...