Maya Angelou: Poems Maya Angelou

“On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself--on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of...

Maya Angelou's "Still I Rise" can be understood as the narrative of a woman who was discarded and hampered by the world and its cruel definition of beauty and success. You can discern the story of a young girl who once felt ashamed to appear in...

Maya Angelou was an acclaimed writer and civil rights activist who reached a broad audience through her works. While she is perhaps best known for her autobiographical prose, her poetry has changed the landscape of feminist writing, bringing in a...

As much as we like to think we forge our own identities, much of who we are is determined by outside forces. Oppression is a powerful force in shaping the identities in Maya Angelou’s memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and in her poems “When I...

Feminist ideas were already at large when Maya Angelou published her poetry anthology “And Still I Rise” in 1984. The 1900s saw many significant changes in terms of women’s rights: women were given the right to vote in 1920, the 1960s saw the rise...

‘Phenomenal woman’, being semiotic of a woman’s stability and security in herself is particularly important in Angelou’s collection given that the one of the recurring themes projected consistently throughout her poems is the idea of confidence,...

Poetry can be a powerful medium in expressing an opinion which is then left to the reader’s interpretation. Maya Angelou’s poetry does not merely ‘remind’ us of our conscience but challenges our sense of right and wrong to protest against...