… 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 major New York house while their stronger, more inventive lines seem to be relegated to low-budget (or no-budget) journals and presses. On the other hand, a good Angelou poem has what we call “possibilities.” One soon discovers that she is on her surest ground when she “borrows” various folk idioms and forms and thereby buttresses her poems by evoking aspects of a culture's written and unwritten heritage. “One More Round,” for example, gains most of its energy from “work songs” and “protest songs” that have come before. In this eight-stanza poem, the even-number stanzas constitute a refrain—obviously, a “work song” refrain:

One more round
And let's heave it down.
One more round
And let's heave it down.

At the heart of the odd-number stanzas are variations upon the familiar “protest” couplet “But before I'll be a slave / I'll be buried in my grave,” such as the following: “I was born to work up to my grave / But I was not born / To be a slave.” The idea of somehow binding “work” and “protest” forms to create new art is absolutely first rate, but the mere alternation of “work” and “protest” stanzas does not, in this instance, carry the idea very far.

Other poems, such as “Willie,” cover familiar ground previously charted by Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, and Gwendolyn Brooks. Indeed, Angelou's Willie, despite his rare powers and essences (“When the sun rises / I am the time. / When the children sing / I am the Rhyme”), approaches becoming memorable only when he is placed in that pantheon where Brooks's Satin-Legs Smith and Brown's Sportin' Beasly are already seated. Similarly, “Through the Inner City to the Suburbs,” “Lady Luncheon Club,” and “Momma Welfare Roll” bear strong resemblances to several poems of Brooks's pre-Black Aesthetic period in Annie Allen and The Bean-Eaters.

Up to a point, “Still I Rise,” Angelou's title poem, reminds us of Brown's famous “Strong Men,” and it is the discovery of that point which helps us define Angelou's particular presence and success in contemporary letters and, if we may say so, in publishing. The poetic and visual rhythms created by the repetition of “Still I rise” and its variants clearly revoice that of Brown's “strong men … strong men gittin' stronger.” But the “I” of Angelou's refrain is obviously female and, in this instance, a woman forthright about the sexual nuances of personal and social struggle:

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I've got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Needless to say, the woman “rising” from these lines is largely unaccounted for in the earlier verse of men and women poets alike. Most certainly, this “phenomenal woman,” as she terms herself in another poem, is not likely to appear, except perhaps in a negative way, in the feminist verse of our time. Where she does appear is in Angelou's own marvelous autobiographies, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings and Gather Together in My Name. In short, Angelou's poems are often woefully thin as poems but they nevertheless work their way into contemporary literary history. In their celebration of a particularly defined “phenomenal woman,” they serve as ancillary, supporting texts for Angelou's more adeptly rendered self-portraits, and even guide the reader to (or back to) the autobiographies. With this achieved, Angelou's “phenomenal woman,” as persona and self-portrait, assumes a posture in our literature that would not be available if she were the product of Angelou's prose or verse alone.