Self discovery and self knowledge in the literary works of maya angelou

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General themes[ edit ] Angelou explores many of the same themes throughout all her writings, in both her autobiographies and poetry. These themes include love, painful loss, music, discrimination and racism, and struggle.

Maggie O’Farrell

She uses familiar and feminine metaphors, many of the same themes also found in blues songsand the dialect of African Americans to express universal themes applicable to all races. Hagen calls "rather ordinary and unimaginative" [30] throughout all her works, both prose and poetry, yet rhyme is found in only seven of the thirty-eight poems in her first volume, Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie.

Angelou's poems have been compared to music and musical forms. He suggests that the best way to analyze the subjects, style, themes, and use of vernacular in this and most of Angelou's poems is to use "a blues-based model", [34] since like the blues singer, Angelou uses laughter or ridicule instead of tears to cope with minor irritations, sadness, and great suffering.

However, she finds Angelou's other poems "mired in hackneyed metaphor and forced rhyme". For example, all the poems in the first section of Diiie focus on love.

Neubauer states that they "describe the whole gamut of love, from the first moment of passionate discovery to the first suspicion of painful loss".

Sylvester states that Angelou uses this technique often in her poetry, and that it elicits a change in the reader's emotions; in this poem, from humor to anger. 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.

Angelou's use of language frees her readers from their traditional perceptions and beliefs about human experience. DeGout says that although this use of language is not the main technique she uses in her poetry, it appears in her more popular poems.

Essick calls most of the poems in Diiie Angelou's "protest poems". DeGout states, however, that Angelou's poems have levels of meaning, and that poems in the volume's first section present the themes of racism, women's power, and liberation more subtly.

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 s and early s, leading up to the publication of Diiie.

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Angelou's poems commend the survivors who have prevailed despite racism, difficulty, and challenges. The even-number stanzas in the eight-stanza poem create a refrain like those found in many work songs and are variations of many protest poems.

Stepto is impressed with Angelou's creation of a new art form out of work and protest forms, but does not feel that she develops it enough. 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".Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Annie Johnson on April 4, in Saint Louis, Missouri.

At the age of 16, she became not only the first black streetcar conductor in San . Learn Astrology in your home town with local astrology classes. I will be adding listings of astrology classes by state and city in the U.S. and by city and country Internationally. Check back often to see if someone is offering Continued.

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Maya Angelou: A leader of self-discovery. Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Clarence Page talks of the passing of Maya Angelou and the lasting effect her presence had on . Maya Angelou was born in and has written a series of autobiographies, All God’s children need travelling shoes being her fifth volume.

(Drew 18) states that her autobiographical works provide powerful insights into the evolution of black women in the 20th century. This site contains links to lesson plans and resources for adolescent and young adult (grades ) literature, including short stories, mysteries, and English literature.

Angelou’s autobiographical self-narrative prose and resonant poetry echo each other interlinking the personality of the prose-writer and the poet persona together as one person – the dynamic – Maya Angelou. I know why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou’s.