Jazz Fantasia

“Jazz Fantasia” is a free verse jazz poem written by American poet Carl Sandburg (1878-1967). Part of Sandburg’s acclaimed 1922 collection Smoke and Steel, the poem captures the essence of early 1920s jazz music and the culture surrounding it. As a quintessentially American poet and man of the people, Sandburg’s poetry is usually defined by its common vernacular and use of everyday imagery and language. “Jazz Fantasia” is no exception and during the 1920s, the poem’s imagery of the speakeasy, the honky-tonk (bars and clubs that sold alcohol), jazz musicians, and the steamboat were popular images appreciated by working class readers. Additionally, Sandburg’s use of free verse and precise imagery squarely places him in the domain of the modernists and imagists who were coming into prominence around the 1920s. Finally, the influence of Walt Whitman—one of Sandburg’s favorites—is prominent in the poem as the prosaic long lines mimic Whitman’s famous style.

Though on the surface the poem is a simple love letter to the imagery and sounds of 1920s jazz, the historical context of jazz along with Sandburg’s preoccupations and history suggest a deeper social message about race, class, and America as a whole. The poem and poet celebrate the working class and advocate for a crucial aspect of African American culture at the time. Both stand at odds with most artistic culture to that point.

While the poem was not well-known or regarded during Sandburg’s life, and while few scholars have paid attention to it, “Jazz Fantasia” is an excellent example of Sandburg’s imagistic, suggestive style.

Poet Biography

Carl Sandburg was born in Illinois in 1878 to Swedish immigrants. Sandburg experienced poverty as a child and he dropped out of school when he was a young teenager so he could help support his family by working odd jobs such as driving a milk wagon, being a porter, bricklaying, and working on a farm. Sandberg continued working odd jobs across the Midwest for most his teen years and into early adulthood, eventually leaving home, living as a hobo, and traveling across the Midwest.

When he was 20, Sandburg enlisted in the military and served during the Spanish-American War, though he did not see any action and served for only a few months. Upon returning from the war, Sandburg enrolled in Lombard College where he studied writing, though he did not graduate.

After 1903, Sandburg moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he worked for a newspaper and engaged in socialist politics, working as a secretary for socialist mayor Emil Seidel. In Milwaukee, Sandburg met his future wife, Lilian Steichen, whom he married in 1908; they had three daughters.

The couple moved to Chicago, Illinois in 1912, where Sandburg’s literary career took off and where he wrote his most well-known works. Sandburg worked for a newspaper and spent time writing about the Chicago race riots as well as writing poetry. During this time, he published three acclaimed books of poetry: Chicago Poems (1916), Cornhuskers (1918), and Smoke and Steel (1920). Cornhuskers earned the Pulitzer Prize—the first of three he won.

During the next two decades, Sandburg wrote an epic history of Abraham Lincoln, which became his most famous work. The epic earned another Pulitzer Prize and nationwide acclaim as a historian and chronicler of America.

During the 1960s, Sandburg was an avid supporter of the civil rights movement, and his progressive views on race garnered admiration among the African American community.

Sandburg died in 1967 in North Carolina at the age of 89.

Poem Text

Sandburg, Carl. “Jazz Fantasia.” 1920. Smoke and Steel, Harcourt Brace.

Summary

“Jazz Fantasia” starts with an invocation to the jazzmen to play. The speaker calls for the musicians to play their drums and banjoes and to “sob on the long cool winding / saxophones” (Lines 1-2).

The second stanza specifies the type of jazzmen the speaker is invoking. These jazzmen are not necessarily professionals in a club with actual instruments; instead, these jazzmen are street musicians who use tin pans and sandpaper on blocks of wood, adding to the percussion section of the music. In this stanza, the speaker imitates the sound of the individual makeshift instruments: “hushahusha-hush” (Line 4).

The third stanza uses a series of similes and imagery to express the feeling of the music. The speaker tells the jazzmen to “moan like an autumn wind” (Line 5), to cry like they wanted somebody in a romantic or sexual way, and to cry like the sound of a car chased by a police motorcycle. The speaker compares the “bang-bang!” (Line 7) of the policeman’s gun to the banging of drums, leading the poem back into the sounds of the music and the instruments: “drums, traps, / banjoes, horns, tin cans” (Lines 7-8). The sounds merge into the image of two people who the music has made engage in a fight and who eventually fall down a staircase.

The final stanza interrupts the chaos of the earlier stanzas with the directive, “Can the rough stuff” (Line 10). The scene shifts to “a Mississippi steamboat” (Line 10) drifting upriver. The speaker compares the sound of the steamboat’s horn to the jazzmen’s music, and images of a cool night with soft stars and a red moon complement the low hills of the river and rising green lights of the steamboat. The poem ends with another invocation of the jazzmen, telling them to “go to it” (Line 12).