I Am the People, the Mob

The poem’s unique speaker is one of the most notable things about Carl Sandburg’s “I Am the People, the Mob.” Unlike most conventional western poetry, in which the poet’s speaker can often be understood as a stand-in for the poet themself or a single, affected persona, the speaker in “I Am the People” is a large, unified collective dubbed “the people—the mob—the crowd—the mass” (Line 1). Though it is easy to assume, from the declaration of identity that open the poem, that the speaker gives voice to all people—or all Americans—the speaker only gives voice to the particular group of working-class Americans. Likewise, there are suggestions of distinctive and important variations even within this particular group of people and the ways by which they operate.

Sandburg carefully employs specific diction choices like “people” and “mob” to describe certain functions and perceptions of the speaker collective. For instance, Line 7 refers to the group exclusively as “People,” while Line 8 only mentions “[t]he mob—the crowd—the mass,” thereby creating a distinction between these groups and the earlier “people.” It is clear from the poem’s first line that “the people—the mob—the crowd—the mass” are to be understood as the “I” of the poem, so this distinction at the end of the poem most likely refers to a distinction in function rather than in form.