Jazz Poetry Research Paper

In the 1900s, the Jazz Music outbreak was in full swing. There were many Jazz musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Kid Ory, and King Oliver who gave the world their soulful tunes by using musical instruments. A few years later, in 1920, the Jazz poetry movement started when several poets began to challenge each other’s rhythm and style. Both poetry and Jazz had many similarities which resulted in merging the two art forms, making jazz poetry. T.S. Eliot, E.E. Cummings, and Ezra Pound were just a handful of the many poets who were involved in this movement. (Shaw) Carl Sandburg was another poet who showed the world his love of jazz music, which he did through poetry. He wrote “Jazz Fantasia” to express that love.
Carl Sandburg was born on January
It can be played on any instrument, but the most commonly known instruments we hear when we listen to jazz are the saxophone, trumpet, trombone, bass, and the guitar. Each jazz musician wants to have their own individual sound when they perform their instrument. The sound that comes out could be raspy, rough, smooth, soulful or even warm or dark. The sound could even be a combination of different sounds, making a recipe for the perfect tune. Jazz sounds can be hard to describe in words, but Carl Sandburg showed us he could do that with his poem “Jazz Fantasia”.
Carl Sandburg uses sound devices, imagery, and personification as he writes “Jazz fantasia”. Sound devices are created throughout this poem. The first stanza says, “Drum on your drums, batter on your banjoes, sob on the long cool winding saxophones”. (Sandburg) Sandburg is grasping the reader’s attention by concentrating on the sounds the instruments are making when being played. “Go to it, O jazzmen”, the reader can imagine him cheering the jazz men on while they play.
When Sandburg states “a Mississippi steamboat pushes up the night river with a hoo-hoo-hoo-oo…”, he is giving the reader a sense of reserve as the party is ending. He uses many pauses to produce a calming effect. His ending flows perfectly and sums up all the excitements that were shown throughout the poem. The poem has a joyful ending when it says “a red moon rides on the humps of the low river hills”. (Sandburg) The last sentence is a sample of personification and a metaphor. The sentence also gives the reader a vibrant, realistic image of the “sun” slowly going down and the darkness coming up. “Even at its frankest, Sandburg's work raises few eyebrows in today's literary culture, where candor is not only tolerated, but encouraged. But when it first appeared, Chicago Poems greeted many observers as a startling challenge to a tradition of American poetry that favored pastoral musings and idealized landscapes. (Maas) The Dial, a key arbiter of the poetry establishment, reacted to Chicago Poems by calling Sandburg's work "gross, simpleminded, sentimental, and sensual." The Boston Transcript, although a bit kinder, criticized the collection for "ill-regulated speech that has neither verse nor prose rhythms." (Maas) Sandburg pointed to the cadence of everyday talk as a model for his poems, and he often favored free