Poetry of Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou is an African-American writer who is best known for her seven autobiographies. She is also a prolific and successful poet. Many critics consider Angelou’s autobiographies more important than her poetry. Her poems continue the themes of mild protest and survival also found in her autobiography.
About Poetry of Maya Angelou in brief
Maya Angelou is an African-American writer who is best known for her seven autobiographies. She is also a prolific and successful poet. Angelou studied and began writing poetry at a young age. She used poetry and other great literature to cope with trauma, as she described in her first and most well-known autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. She became a poet after a series of occupations as a young adult, including as a cast member of a European tour of Porgy and Bess, and a performer of calypso music in nightclubs in the 1950s. Many of the songs she wrote during that period later found their way to her later poetry collections. She eventually gave up performing for a writing career. In 1993, she recited one of her best-known poems, \”On the Pulse of Morning\”, at the inauguration of President Bill Clinton. In the late 1980s, she returned to music, recording her first album, Miss Calypso, which captured her focus at the time, and her years as a nightclub performer. She has been called \”the black woman’s poet laureate\”, and her poems have been called the anthems of African Americans. Many critics consider Angelou’s autobiographies more important than her poetry. Although her books have been best-sellers, her poetry has been studied less. Her lack of critical acclaim has been attributed to her popular success and to critics’ preferences for poetry as a written form rather than a spoken, performed one.
As she does throughout her autobiographies, Angelou speaks not only for herself, but for her entire gender and race. Her poems continue the themes of mild protest and survival also found in her autobiography, and inject hope through humor. Tied with her theme of racism is her treatment of the struggle and hardships experienced by her race. She changed her name from Rita Johnson to Maya Angelou, a name that set her apart and captured the feel of her calyp so dance performances. In her fourth autobiography, The Heart of a Woman, Angelou describes her life as a woman of color and her struggle to overcome racism and sexism. She also describes her love for her family and friends, and how they helped her cope with the trauma of being raped as a child. She describes her relationship with her late husband, who died of cancer in 1996, and the love she has for her grandchildren. She writes about her life and family in her memoirs, “The Heart of A Woman,” which is published by Simon & Schuster and is available in hardback, paperback, and e-book. The book is also available in audio and video versions. For confidential support call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or visit http://www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org/. For support in the UK, call the Samaritans on 08457 90 90 90 or visit a local Samaritans branch or click here for details.
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This page is based on the article Poetry of Maya Angelou published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 16, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
