"Caged Bird" owes its central symbolism to "Sympathy," an 1899 poem by African-American writer Paul Laurence Dunbar.
Born in 1872 to freed slaves from Kentucky, Dunbar was keenly aware of the prevalence and dehumanizing consequences of racism in the United States. In "Sympathy," Dunbar’s speaker sympathizes with a caged bird, explaining throughout the poem that he knows what the caged bird feels, why it beats its wings, and why it sings.
Through imagery that depicts the bird's frustration at its confinement, Dunbar's speaker sympathizes with the caged bird as he too yearns for but is denied freedom. Angelou uses the power of the poetic attack against racism in "Sympathy" to expand and explore its themes from her own perspective as a post-Civil Rights Movement writer. Angelou also used the line from "Sympathy" as the title of her 1969 autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
