Jazz Fantasia

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1922

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

The Jazz Age

Published at the beginning of the Jazz Age, “Jazz Fantasia” is more a precursor than a retrospective. The poem is unique in its celebration of the new art form before it became all the rage in the 1920s. Sandburg’s celebration of jazz shows his progressive mindset and foresight. He was almost 40 when he wrote the poem, so his ability to see the value and artistry in something that older generations would deride speaks to his youthful mindset and connection to societal trends.

In many ways, the age of jazz represents an innocence typical of the time. Wedged between World War I and the Great Depression, historians often regard the Jazz Age as a sort of party that rejected the cold reality of the time—including the massive injustices faced by African Americans, the working class, and other minority groups. Sandburg’s poem embraces the romantic notion of the time. It celebrates the same images celebrated in The Great Gatsby (1925), including the youthful party scene, jazz music, sex, alcohol, and general revelry.

But unlike The Great Gatsby, “Jazz Fantasia” does not examine the dark side of the era. Instead, the poem connects the liveliness of jazz with more spiritual images of nature and the progression of time, expressed in the last stanza. This might be because Sandburg wrote the poem at the beginning of the jazz age while F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote Gatsby a few years into the ‘20s.

Nevertheless, the poem oozes 1920s jazz age imagery. From the back-alley musicians playing on homemade instruments to the racing cars chased by police motorcycles, to the club goers fighting in a clinch atop the stairs, the poem cannot exist without the overarching context of the era. The inclusion of the last stanza adds historical and spiritual weight to the time, suggesting that jazz music itself can connect its players and listeners to the heavens. The invocation of the jazzmen—much like the aforementioned invocation of the muses—gives the era a mythological feel, and the ode-like form of the poem adds literary and artistic significance to the players. In totality, the poem presents a romantic vision of jazz and the jazz age.

Music

Like the theme of the jazz age, the poem is thematically concerned with music and its power to liven, move, and transcend beyond people. “Jazz Fantasia” treats the jazzmen like mythological figures. Even the use of the word “fantasia” in the title connotes fantastical imagery, like the fantastic nature imagery used to describe the musicians and their instruments. In this world, the instruments are personified as they moan, cry, ooze, and inspire other people to fight. At the same time, the speaker clearly identifies the instruments as tools helping the jazzmen express their feelings. In this sense, the jazzmen use their instruments in a magical way, invoking an almost voodoo-like tone into the world.

Ultimately, the poem suggests music is a living thing, and the people who can perform music are gods, bringing new life into the world with their notes and melodies.

The theme of music as spiritual and mystical is not a new one, and Sandburg is aware of the tradition. The word “music” comes from the ancient Greek muses, who were goddesses responsible for art and lyrical poetry. When orating poetry or performing drama, Greek writers invoked the muses, believing that the words they were about to perform were divine and only came to them through the intervention of the gods. Similarly, many religious traditions hold that religious texts are divinely written. Christians believe God delivered the Bible to men, for example.

The tradition of a writer or musician as a conduit for the gods is well-established, and Sandburg plays on that with his description of the jazzmen, who act as modern conduits for this new sound and art, which inspires the speaker of the poem.

Urbanization

“Jazz Fantasia” exists in Sandburg’s Chicago poems, which all deal in some way with scenes from the city of Chicago. Smoke and Steel has sections with names like Haze, Broken-Face Gargoyles, and Smoke Nights; it contains poems like “Smoke and Steel,” “Work Gangs,” “Alley Rats,” and “Manufactured Gods.” There is a preoccupation with the urban landscape and the city in these poems, and Sandburg is careful in “Jazz Fantasia” to continue that theme with specific imagery and sensory details. Specifically, the second stanza has back-alley imagery of street musicians, and the third stanza paints the scene of an underground club full of music, bootleggers, and drunken fights.

The urbanization imagery contrasts with the natural imagery of the final stanza, which depicts a scene from the Mississippi River. But even in this natural image full of stars, hills, and the moon, the central image of the scene is the steamboat, chugging its way up the river, its smoke becoming one with the natural imagery. The steamboat is an image of incoming urbanization and machine power, and though it usually used as a negative image of urbanization, Sandburg’s depiction conveys it as a source of music and culture coming from the south to the north.