19 pages • 38 minutes read
I Am the People, the Mob
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Literary Devices
Form and Meter
“I Am the People, the Mob,” is written in free verse—a popular form among American Modernists in the 1910s and 20s. Free verse is unique among poetic forms because of its lack of obvious formal constraints or structures, but that does not mean it is disorganized. Often, free verse poets organize their works using idiosyncratic principles for the purpose of heightening poetic effect.
Sandburg achieves a sense of organization through the way he structures each line of the “I Am the People” as if it were a small, individual piece of prose. Though many of the lines contain more than one sentence, they seem to be structured using similar grammatical principles to individual prose sentences, and work to express a single thought or image through declarative statements. This kind of free verse poetry is similar to some works of Walt Whitman, which are organized in a comparable way. The separation of these ideas into verse lines is the main element that distinguishes this kind of free verse from prose or prose poetry.
The expressive freedom free verse allows—as it is not constrained by external formal rules—heightens the content of Sandburg’s poem. The people, through the speaker’s use of free verse, demonstrate a desire to be removed from rigid structures that limit their ability to express themselves. Just as the rigid societal structures make the best of the workers “sucked out and wasted” (Line 5), a rigid poetic form would make Sandburg’s expression impossible. Likewise, the free verse form, just like the “mob” of the poem, exists outside of these rigid systems and allows a truer expression of the political and poetical will.
Diction
The speaker of Sandburg’s poem gives voice to a group of undereducated, lower-class workers. In this respect, it is significant that Sandburg’s speaker does not use affected, Latinate language typical of the poetic genre, but instead uses straightforward, everyday American diction to accurately capture the people’s voice. This use of contemporary American vernacular is best seen in the two phrases “workingman” (Line 3) and “played me like a fool” (Line 7), which are representative of the language’s common usage rather than poetic formality.
Instead of raising the level of diction to the divine, Sandburg could be said to be lowering it to the lowest material denominator. By using commonly understood language and simple sentence constructions, Sandburg creates poetry that is not only representative of the people, but that can be understood by the average literate workingman.
Repetition and Anaphora
Other than the poem’s prose-like structure, the primary device that together holds “I Am the People” is Sandburg’s use of repetition. Various words and phrases are repeated throughout the poem to give the work internal coherence despite its otherwise unconnected, declarative sentences. The repeated use of “I am” that opens Lines 1, 3, 4, and 5, is perhaps the most obvious use of this repetition. This kind of repetition of a phrase at the beginning of successive lines is referred to as anaphora, and can sometimes feel like a chant. In “I Am the People,” the anaphoric openings similarly function, providing the people a sort of ritual power, as if they are growing in strength as they repeatedly declare their identity.
The repetition of “I forget” in Line 5 serves a very different function from the affirmative “I am.” As discussed in the longer analysis, each repetition of “I forget” comes after some affliction has harmed the people, and in that way structures the poem’s fifth line through a near-constant cycle of experience and forgetting. “I forget” is also used in reference to the “few red drops for history to remember” (Line 6), demonstrating that the people’s memory is not attached to historical record.
Finally, the way Sandburg sandwiches the poem between the phrase “the mob—the crowd—the mass” (Lines 1, 8) not only gives the work a sense of completion and self-sufficiency, it insists that the reader evoke the same image at both ends of the poem. This potentially suggests that, like the “Napoleons and Lincolns” (Line 4) who come in cycles from the people, the poem’s class struggles are constantly ongoing.
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By Carl Sandburg
