FOG- Date: 1916
SOUP- 1920s
Carl Sandburg
Biography
 FIRST NAME: Carl
 LAST NAME: Sandburg
 OCCUPATION: Journalist, Author, Poet
 BIRTH DATE: January 06, 1878
 DEATH DATE: July 22, 1967
 PLACE OF DEATH: Flat Rock, North Carolina
 PLACE OF BIRTH: Galesburg, Illinois
Biography-2
 Carl Sandburg was born on January 6, 1878, in Galesburg,
Illinois. He fought in the Spanish-American War. In 1913, he
moved to Chicago to work as a journalist. In 1914, his poetry
was published in Poetry magazine. His well-recieved free verse
poetry focused on American workers. He also collected
folksongs into books and wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning
biography about Abraham Lincoln.
Historic/Social Background
 The early 1900s in America was a point in time when the
Industrial Revolution was changing the way many Americans made
a living. The topics in this section cover daily life in this time
period and how new inventions changed the working world.
 After the depression of the 1890s, immigration jumped from a
low of 3.5 million in that decade to a high of 9 million in the first
decade of the new century. Immigrants from Northern and
Western Europe continued coming as they had for three centuries,
but in decreasing numbers. After the 1880s, immigrants
increasingly came from Eastern and Southern European countries,
as well as Canada and Latin America. By 1910, Eastern and
Southern Europeans made up 70 percent of the immigrants
entering the country. After 1914, immigration dropped off
because of the war, and later because of immigration restrictions
imposed in the 1920s.
Poems by Carl Sandburg
Fog
The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
Carl Sandburg
Soup
I saw a famous man eating soup.
I say he was lifting a fat broth
Into his mouth with a spoon.
His name was in the newspapers that day
Spelled out in tall black headlines
And thousands of people were talking about him.
When I saw him,
He sat bending his head over a plate
Putting soup in his mouth with a spoon.
Carl Sandburg
Poem Analysis - Fog
 Carl Sandburg's poem, "Fog," is among the few exceptions
that mark Sandburg's break from free verse poetry. Fog", a
mere six lines long, is written in verse-form and is an
innocent expression of finding beauty in an ordinary world.
 The movement between line breaks also contributes to the
poem's transition between moods, beginning with an
anticipation that leads us to a sort of anxious uncertainty, and
then ends with relief as the fog "moves on."
Poem Analysis - Soup
 Instead, the impact of "Soup" is in all the little touches, the
splashes of detail, in phrases such as 'tall black headlines' and
'bending his head over a plate'.
 Sandburg's passionate unstructured verse may have
invigorated American poetry when it was first published in
the early years of this century, in recent years it has fallen out
of favour with critics due to its seeming lack of discipline
Explanation - Fog
 Various emotions which are expressed by the use of variety
of techniques including metaphors, similes and
onomatopoeia. The emphasis on the aesthetics of language
and the use of techniques such as repetition, meter and
rhyme are commonly used. He makes heavy use of imagery
and word association to quickly convey emotions.
 Fog can be mysterious, unpredictable, and a little scary. It can
come out of nowhere and drop right on your head without
much of a warning. And then, like a kitty, it moves on leaving
us kind of in awe as we wonder where it's going next.
Explanation - Soup
 A nice little vignette that makes a simple point, but makes it
well: even the rich and famous are like you and I
 The famous man, who had his name in the headlines puts his
head to the plate and eats the soup with a spoon like most
people.
 "The rich are different from you and me." -- F. Scott Fitzgerald.
"Yes, they have more money." -- Ernest Hemingway.
Comparison
 Poem and Soup are both very different poems containing two
different subjects.
 However they both have his style of free verse, and the unrhymed scheme.
 Both poems describe the world around us where one is about
a famous person, and the other about the fog.
Significance
 These poems help us learn that poems do not have to have a
structure that limits our message.
 His poems aren’t limited to one subject and he can freely
express his thoughts into his poems
 We chose these poems because of their differences.
 Also because they were short.
Jackie Ling’s Poem
I am Imperfect
Don’t hate
Because I make
Mistakes
Yet I ponder
Isn’t it what
makes me unique
instead of
weak
Raymond’s Poem
I Run the race
At a steady pace
With eyes on the prize
I will rise
Richard’s Poem
Mountain Cabin
I would climb the mountain
Get to my dad’s cabin
And have a grand old time
Sit by the fire and feeling sublime
Drink hot chocolate
And staying up late
Oh I love my dad’s cabin
Sitting high so high on the MOUNTAIN!
Jackie Ng’s Poem
There once lived a little girl in old Alpaco
That wanted to eat a good burrito
But her mother wanted to eat a good taco
Her mother didn’t care which they had
As long as it had a filling of cheerios
So said the little girl with cheer she did
‘Why don’t we have both’?
Bibliography
 "Carl Sandburg." 2013. The Biography Channel website. Jun 8 2013, 05:51





http://www.biography.com/people/carl-sandburg-9470854.
"Immigration in the early 1900s." 2000. EyeWitness to History. Jun 8 2013,
06:01 www.eyewitnesstohistory.com
" Overview: "Fog," by Carl (August) Sandburg. " n/a. June 8 2013, 07:12
http://iws2.collin.edu/mtolleson/2328online/2328notesfog.htm
“Fog by Carl Sandburg.” 2012. n/a. June 8 2013 07:44
http://www.poeticterminology.net/american-poetry/30-fog-by-carlsandburg.htm
Shmoop Editorial Team. "Fog Analysis" Shmoop.com. Shmoop University, Inc., 11
Nov. 2008. Web. 8 Jun. 2013.
“Soup -- Carl Sandburg.” 2013. BlogSpot. Jun 8 2013, 07:11
http://wonderingminstrels.blogspot.com/2001/07/soup-carl-sandburg.html
Done by : Richard Vargas, Jackie Ling, Jackie Ng, Raymond Chen - J6D 22