Poetry of Maya Angelou
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.
[3] According to scholar Yasmin Y. DeGout, literature also affects Angelou's sensibilities as the poet and writer she becomes, especially the "liberating discourse that would evolve in her own poetic canon".
She was a cast member of a European tour of Porgy and Bess in 1954 and 1955 and was a cabaret singer in nightclubs in the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas throughout the 1950s.
[6] As she described in her fourth autobiography, The Heart of a Woman (1981), Angelou eventually gave up performing for a writing career, although music remained an important aspect of her poetry.
She wrote on legal pads while lying on the bed, with only a bottle of sherry, a deck of cards to play solitaire, Roget's Thesaurus, and the Bible, and left by the early afternoon.
[19] Her first volume of poetry, Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie, published in 1971 shortly after Caged Bird, became a best-seller and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
[22] Angelou was the first African-American woman and living poet selected by Sterling Publishing, who placed 25 of her poems in a volume of their Poetry for Young People series in 2004.
[30] Librarian John Alfred Avant states that many of Angelou's poems could be set to music like that of jazz singer and musician Nina Simone.
[36] In Southern Women Writers, Carol A. Neubauer states that they "describe the whole gamut of love, from the first moment of passionate discovery to the first suspicion of painful loss".
[38] Critic William Sylvester states that the metaphors in Angelou's poetry serve as "coding", or litotes, for meanings understood by other Blacks.
Sylvester says that Angelou uses the same technique in "Letter to an Aspiring Junkie", also in Diiie, in which the understatement contained in the repeated phrase "nothing happens" is a litotes for the prevalence of violence in society.
[39] DeGout states that Angelou conveys meaning through literary imagery, denser vocabulary, and poetic techniques such as catachresis, ambiguity, and anthropomorphism.
DeGout views "A Zorro Man" as an example of Angelou's ability to translate her personal experience into political discourse and the textured liberation she places in all her poetry.
Many of Angelou's poems, especially those in Diiie, focus on women's sexual and romantic experiences, but challenge the gender codes of poetry written in previous eras.
She also challenges the male-centered and militaristic themes and messages found in the poetry of the Black Arts movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, leading up to the publication of Diiie.
[49] I note the obvious differencesbetween each sort and type,but we are more alike, my friends,than we are unalike According to Bloom, the themes in Angelou's poetry are common in the lives of many American Blacks.
[50] Neubauer states that Angelou focuses on the lives of African Americans from the time of slavery to the 1960s, and that her themes "deal broadly with the painful anguish suffered by blacks forced into submission, with guilt over accepting too much, and with protest and basic survival".
Stepto also praises Angelou for borrowing "various folk rhythms and forms and thereby buttresses her poems by evoking aspects of a culture's written and unwritten heritage".
Neubauer analyzes two poems in Diiie, "Times-Square-Shoeshine-Composition" and "Harlem Hopscotch", that support her assertion that for Angelou, "conditions must improve for the black race".
Like her previous poetry collections, Angelou's fourth volume, Shaker, Why Don't You Sing?, celebrates the ability to survive despite threatened freedom, lost love, and defeated dreams.
[38] Their tone moves from themes of strength to humor and satire, and captures both the loneliness of lovers and the sacrifice that many slaves experienced without succumbing to defeat or despair.
[38] The poems in Shaker emphasize determination despite the "unabiding anguish over the oppression of the black race",[32] and deal with the cruel treatment of slaves in the South.
[44] In his negative review of And Still I Rise, Stepto expresses disbelief that Angelou's poems would be produced by a major publishing house while poetry written by other lesser-known talents could not.
[57] Gillespie states that Angelou's poems "reflect the richness and subtlety of Black speech and sensibilities" and were meant to be read aloud.
[59] Sylvester, who says that Angelou "has an uncanny ability to capture the sound of a voice on a page",[18] places her poems, especially the ones in Diiie, in the "background of black rhythms".
[18] Chad Walsh, reviewing Diiie in Book World, calls Angelou's poems "a moving blend of lyricism and harsh social observation".
[60] Jessica Letkemann, writing for Billboard, traced the musical qualities of Angelou's poems to her experience as a singer and musician, and said that they were "full of rhythm, melody, cadence buoying her powerful words".
[59] Critic James Finn Cotter, in his review of Oh Pray, calls it an "unfortunate example of the dangers of success" and states that Angelou's fame has "muted the private and personal quality that it takes to be essential to poetry".
[62] Critic John Alfred Avant, despite the fact that the volume was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, states that Diiie "isn't accomplished, not by any means".
[64] Scholar Joanne Braxton asserts that "Angelou's audience, composed largely of women and blacks, isn't really affected by what white and/or male critics of the dominant literary tradition have to say about her work.
