Maya Angelou

"Graduation" describes Maya Angelou's graduation from the eighth grade. There is great excitement before the event, but it is spoiled by the patronizing speech of a white politician who suggests...

The speaker of the poem doesn't want sympathy for aging, as she is the same person she has always been, despite getting older. She will accept understanding from other people, knowing she has changed...

Maya Angelou's "Phenomenal Woman" celebrates female strength, confidence, and inner beauty. The poem highlights how these qualities, rather than traditional notions of physical attractiveness, define...

The thesis of "Sister Flowers" is the impact Mrs. Flowers had on Angelou's life, both figuratively and literally. She taught Angelou respect for language, books, education, and life. Angelou admired...

Angelou's "We Had Him" is an elegiac poem honoring Michael Jackson. Written in free verse, it captures the memory and impact of Jackson through vivid imagery. The themes include the life/death cycle,...

The tone of this passage is one of rueful, sardonic amusement.

Courage is the virtue that allows you to practice all the other virtues, even when it's frightening or uncomfortable to do so. To practice honesty, for example, you must be willing to say things...

In "Equality," Maya Angelou uses vivid imagery and sound effects to emphasize the struggle for civil rights. She employs repetitive phrases and rhythmic patterns to mimic the march for equality,...

The relationship between Maya Angelou and her mother could be described as troubled, sporadic, or disconnected. Her early, formative years were certainly impacted by the experiences Angelou had,...

In her speech for Coretta Scott King's funeral, Maya Angelou uses various poetic devices to characterize Coretta Scott King and to emphasize the importance of peace.

This is a difficult question because of the tremendous impact that Maya Angelou had on a number of different areas.  Her book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was groundbreaking work of...

I assume you're referring to "Mrs. Flowers: A Moment of Friendship."  If so, this is a children's book that is taken from Maya Angelou's autobiographical book "I Know Why the Caged Bird...

The stanzas are homogenous in structure. Each has four or five rhyming lines, then the line "I say," then a few lines of rhyming imagery describing the speaker physically, then a refrain: I’m a...

I am not really sure in which direction you are going with this, but there are several connections between these two people.   Both recieved the Kennedy Honors.  Johnny Cash and Maya...

The primary concept of “Woman Work” is the idea of that the social and cultural responsibilities of being a woman might have to be balanced with the construction of space that could be a “room of...

What a phenomenal women Dr. Maya Angelou is. One of her most popular books, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, is about the first seventeen years of her life. It focuses on her upbringing in the...

The language and the structure that Angelou adopts in her poem “Woman Work” reinforce the theme of the weight that Black women have to carry and, at the same time, celebrate Black women’s strength...

Poet Langston Hughes (1907–1967) and playwright August Wilson (1945–2005) created works that document and reflect the African American experience and struggle for equality in the twentieth century....

Maya Angelou recounts details of her surprise meeting with Martin Luther King Junior in her "Encounter with Martin Luther King Junior." In The Heart of A Woman, Angelou discusses this meeting and...

The first person narrator in the story "Grandmother's Victory" is actually the author herself: Maya Angelou. Maya Angelou was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1928. She was named Marguerite Annie...

We might approach Maya Angelou's poem "Woman Work" from a Jungian psychoanalytic point of view or from a Freudian psychoanalytic critical perspective. Using the Jungian inflection of...

As with many poets, Life Doesn’t Frighten Me should be analyzed within the context of the author’s life. In the case of Maya Angelou, that life, recently ended in May 2014, was one of enormous...

Maya Angelou’s “Caged Bird” is poem about the effects of slavery that echoes a famous poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar called “Sympathy.” Both poems juxtapose images of two birds, one free and one...

These two poems by the poet Maya Angelou show the brighter and hopeful side of aging, but she doesn't sugar-coat it. Old folks, she seems to say, are people too. They ache more than the young, but...

The most prevalent theme in "Africa" is that of enslavement. Throughout the poem the author provides images that support this theme: "two Niles her tears" expresses Africa's great sorrow. (I...

Angelou is referring to her African ancestry. By returning to Africa for a visit, she could both acknowledge her roots and,  at the same time, celebrate how far she had come - from slavery to...