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    A Study Guide for Carl Sandburg's "Jazz Fantasia"
    A Study Guide for Carl Sandburg's "Jazz Fantasia"
    A Study Guide for Carl Sandburg's "Jazz Fantasia"
    Ebook34 pages24 minutes

    A Study Guide for Carl Sandburg's "Jazz Fantasia"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Carl Sandburg's "Jazz Fantasia," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 2, 2016
    ISBN9781535826464
    A Study Guide for Carl Sandburg's "Jazz Fantasia"

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      A Study Guide for Carl Sandburg's "Jazz Fantasia" - Gale

      10

      Jazz Fantasia

      Carl Sandburg

      1920

      Introduction

      Jazz Fantasia was written by Carl August Sandburg in 1919 and published in 1920, at a time when jazz, the first truly American form of music, was being born. This was also the dawn of the Roaring Twenties and Prohibition. Jazz and blues were played in honky-tonks and speakeasies (types of legal and illegal nightclubs), where boot-legged alcohol flowed freely. Jazz involves loud, lively musical instruments, rhythm, and fun. Jazz Fantasia is about the celebratory sounds of jazz instruments, along with soulful sounds of the blues, embodied in a Mississippi steamboat. A fantasia is a literary or musical work that evokes the imagination through fanciful, supernatural, or unnatural devices.

      It is speculated that Sandburg got the idea for this poem while watching a minstrel show. According to Bill Kirchner in The Oxford Companion to Jazz, Sandburg said in All the Young Strangers that whenever minstrel shows came to town, he always had two bits for a ticket to the top gallery. Minstrel shows found large audiences and positive reviews. Most important, Kirchner writes, they stimulated an attitude indissolubly linked with jazz. They seemed to urge wild, spontaneously, sympathetic movement among singers, players, and audiences alike. It was jazz rising, before it was known as jazz.

      The poem first appeared in a collection titled Smoke and Steel; the collection is about Chicago, the city where jazz got its name, although this form of music actually began in New Orleans. Sandburg traveled around the Midwestern states at the age of eighteen as a hobo, hopping into railroad boxcars, riding the small platforms between cars and stowing away on steamboats. He is known today as the People's Poet, writing about the daily life and hardships of the poor in their own language. Music plays an integral part in his poetry, and he is remembered as a balladeer who sang his poems and prose, accompanying himself on a banjo.

      Though the poem was relatively obscure during Sandburg's lifetime, Jazz Fantasia has gained a great deal more attention as

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