![]() You've got to go out and kick ass."ġ1."Try to be a rainbow in someone's cloud."ġ2."My wish for you is that you continue. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage."ġ0."I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. But I refuse to be reduced by it."Ħ."I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."ħ."If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat."Ĩ."I speak to the Black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition - about what we can endure, dream, fail at and survive."ĩ."Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can't practice any other virtue consistently. ![]() You have nothing to prove to anybody."Ĥ."A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song."ĥ. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem.1."There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."Ģ."If I am not good to myself, how can I expect anyone else to be good to me?"ģ."You alone are enough. ![]() The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. We’re especially fond of Angelou’s image of walking the ocean floor and never having to breathe. Can a country capable of such technological inventions not also heal itself of its social division?Ī poem about overcoming fear and not allowing it to master you, ‘Life Doesn’t Frighten Me’ is the perfect poem to conclude this pick of Maya Angelou’s best poems: a powerful declaration of self-belief and the importance of facing one’s fears.Īngelou lists a number of things, from barking dogs to grotesque fairy tales in the Mother Goose tradition, but comes back to her mantra: ‘Life doesn’t frighten me at all’. Playing on the name of her home country, Angelou invites us to reflect on the divisive nature of the ‘United’ States of America – a country in which racial and socio-economic divisions loom large.Īngelou refers to some of the great ‘achievements’ of America, from the Telstar satellite to the atomic bomb. The references to food being gone and rent being due suggest that life is a constant struggle for the Black Americans depicted in the poem, which takes its title from a prominent African-American district in New York. Here’s another poem in which racial inequality is tied to freedom, although poverty is another salient theme of the poem. ![]() The speaker is such a woman, who nevertheless finds something to call her ‘own’ when she looks to the sun, the rain, the oceans, and the mountains: nature’s bounty. This poem is perhaps the best example of this theme in Angelou’s poetry. Another important strand to her work is work itself: a focus on the daily menial tasks which many wives and mothers have to carry out around the home as part of their domestic duties. Many of Maya Angelou’s best-known poems focus on the plight of women, and specifically Black women. Yet Angelou tells us that the girl in the poem is ‘blameless’, inviting us to read the poem as about ‘mothers’ and ‘daughters’ in a wider sense: it is about the generational shift between African-American women of Angelou’s mother’s age, and those of Angelou’s own generation. The subject of the poem is a girl who goes home to her mother’s arms, afraid and ‘creeping’ because she fears she is in trouble.
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