Angelou, Maya - R. B. Stepto (essay date 1979)

R. B. Stepto (essay date 1979)

SOURCE: A review of And Still I Rise, in Parnassus,Vol. 8, No. 1, Fall–Winter, 1979, pp. 313–15.

[In the following review, Stepto finds the poems in Angelou's third volume “woefully thin,” but significant because of their relation to her autobiographical writing.]

… And Still I Rise is Angelou's third volume of verse, and most of its thirty-two poems are as slight as those which dominated the pages of the first two books. Stanzas such as this one,

In every town and village,
In every city square,
In crowded places
I search the faces
Hoping to find
Someone to care.

or the following,

Then you rose into my life,
Like a promised sunrise.
Brightening my days with the light in your eyes.
I've never been so strong,
Now I'm where I belong.

cannot but make lesser-known talents grieve all the more about how this thin stuff finds its way to the rosters of a...

[The entire page is 785 words long]

Join eNotes

The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the:

eNotes Pass