SOURCE: Mieder, Wolfgang. “Behold the Proverbs of a People: A Florilegium of Proverbs in Carl Sandburg's Poem ‘Good Morning, America.’” Southern Folklore Quarterly 35 (1971): 160-68.

In the following essay, Mieder studies Sandburg's use and manipulation of American proverbs in his poem “Good Morning, America.”

There are basically only two ways for the scholar to achieve his task of collecting proverbs—either he undertakes field research with such modern aids as electronic recording devices to gather up the popular language, or as the Germans call it the expressions of the Volksmund, or he must rely on the written records of a certain age, extracting the proverbial lore that found its way into literature of various kinds. The investigation of the writings of past centuries for proverbs has led to striking cultural as well as philological results, and yet, as Archer Taylor repeatedly points out, “until now regrettably small numbers of...