An Analysis of Carl Sandburg's Five Poems

Abstract

This qualitative study focuses on analyzing, comparing, interpreting, and evaluating five poems by Carl Sandburg including: “Fog”, “Cool Tombs”, “Mamie”, “Chicago” and “I Am the People, the Mob”. This inquiry serves two purposes of analyzing poems to find new aspects in the five works of Carl Sandburg and to give a view of arguing whether the author actually wrote poems or not and comparing them together to find the commonalities and differences that make up the poet's unique style. This study follows a qualitative design under the scope of discourse analysis, to which text analysis and other analyzing techniques for documentation were applied. Therefore, the focus of this study will be on collecting, analyzing, and comparing information from the five poems. The resulting data will refer to the themes, language, form, metaphor, literary devices, perspective, background, and messages. The findings indicate similarities and differences among the five poems that make up the author's unique style and how to distinguish one from another. Besides, novelties compared to previous studies on the five poems are also discovered and the results also give a point of view that the poet actually wrote poetry.