Angelou, Maya - Lyman B. Hagen (essay date 1997)
Lyman B. Hagen (essay date 1997)
SOURCE: “Poetry: Something About Everything,” in Heart of a Woman, Mind of a Writer, and Soul of a Poet: A Critical Analysis of the Writings of Maya Angelou, University Press of America, Inc., 1997, pp. 118–36.
[In the following excerpt, Hagen presents an anatomy of Angelou's poetry and its subject matter.]
Of Maya Angelou's six published volumes of poetry, the first four have been collected into one Bantam paperback volume, titled Maya Angelou: Poems (1986). Her early practice was to alternate a prose publication with a poetry volume, and a fifth “collection” follows her fifth autobiography. Unlike the four previous volumes of poetry, this fifth work titled Now Sheba Sings the Song (1987), adds a new dimension. Here fifteen or so short poems are responses to sketches of African-American women done by artist Tom Feelings, whom Angelou has known for many years. The combined talents...
[The entire page is 5645 words long]
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