"Chicago," written Carl Sandburg is a rousing piece of writing about the lives of people in Chicago and about the city as a whole. In 1894, Carl Sandburg's father, a laborer in the railroad yards of a small Illinois prairie town, secured a pass for his son to see Chicago. The enormous vitality of the city, as well as its economic injustices, left a deep impression on the young man that would emerge later in his …showed first 75 words of 878 total…

…showed last 75 words of 878 total…the defiant, brawling laughter of the ignorant prizefighter drunk with his own power. This is Sandburg's vision of Chicago, a defiant, almost mythological entity that offers both deliverance and pain to humankind. It is a vision presented in a fiercely-toned poem, a tone which matches the city's animal fury and rabid hunger for progress, for Sandburg's Chicago is "Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness."