Jazz Fantasia
Jazz Fantasia - context Summary
Composed in Jazz Age 1920
Written in free verse and published in 1920’s Smoke and Steel, Sandburg’s "Jazz Fantasia" is an incantatory call to musicians to unleash chaotic, sensual sound. The poem summons drums, banjos, trombones and saxophones through onomatopoeic and kinetic language, moving from street brawls to a Mississippi nightboat scene. It places jazz at the center of American experience, using rhythm and vivid imagery to evoke urban energy and riverine nocturne.
Read Complete AnalysesDrum on your drums, batter on your banjoes, sob on the long cool winding saxophones. Go to it, O jazzmen. Sling your knuckles on the bottoms of the happy tin pans, let your trombones ooze, and go husha- husha-hush with the slippery sand-paper. Moan like an autumn wind high in the lonesome treetops, moan soft like you wanted somebody terrible, cry like a racing car slipping away from a motorcycle cop, bang-bang! you jazzmen, bang altogether drums, traps, banjoes, horns, tin cans — make two people fight on the top of a stairway and scratch each other's eyes in a clinch tumbling down the stairs. Can the rough stuff . . . now a Mississippi steamboat pushes up the night river with a hoo-hoo-hoo-oo . . . and the green lanterns calling to the high soft stars . . . a red moon rides on the humps of the low river hills . . . go to it, O jazzmen.
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