An analysis is given for the compression of linearly chirped optical pulses propagating in dispersive absorbing media. Numerical calculations are reported for frequency‐chirped CO2laser pulses which propagate as phonon polaritons in &agr;‐quartz or as surface phonon polaritons on BeO, including the influence of thin dielectric films on the surface propagation mode. Quantitative evaluation is made of the use of these modes to form dispersive optical pulse delay lines. It is shown that absorption limits both the usable propagation length and the curvature of the dispersion curves. For the materials considered, this approach is restricted to 10‐psec pulses having THz chirp bandwidths, with large accompanying absorption losses.