Style
Style - form Summary
Free Verse as Personal Armor
Sandburg's short free-verse poem stages a direct, conversational defense of artistic individuality. The speaker equates style with a face or body part—integral, embodied, and nontransferable—and issues blunt imperatives against attempts to strip it away. The loose, plainspoken free-verse line mirrors that claim: its colloquial rhythm and refusal of formal ornament reinforce the poem's argument that style is personal, lived, and essential rather than a detachable aesthetic choice.
Read Complete AnalysesStyle--go ahead talking about style. You can tell where a man gets his style just as you can tell where Pavlowa got her legs or Ty Cobb his batting eye. Go on talking. Only don't take my style away. It's my face. Maybe no good but anyway, my face. I talk with it, I sing with it, I see, taste and feel with it, I know why I want to keep it. Kill my style and you break Pavlowa's legs, and you blind Ty Cobb's batting eye.
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