Maya Angelou: Selections

[Jump to poems by publication year: 1970s | 1980s | 1990s ]

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) had a broad and distinguished career both inside and outside the literary realm. She is most famous for her work as a poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist, working with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. She also worked in entertainment as a singer, a dancer, an actor, and a director. Her poetry was inspired and informed by her life and work, and this personal connection made her poems profound and powerful. Over the course of a career spanning the 1960s to her death in 2014, she captured, provoked, inspired, and ultimately transformed American people and culture. The following eight poems—presented chronologically from her earliest publication to the public poem she read at President Bill Clinton’s first inauguration—showcase Angelou’s poetics.

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Maya Angelou’s selected poems in order of publication

1970s

“The Mothering Blackness” (1971)

She came home running

       back to the mothering blackness   

With a firm root in African American history, many of Angelou’s poems, such as this one, can be traced to the work songs slaves sang. The repeating lines give the sense of a refrain, and varying line lengths and numbers of syllables give an improvised feel. Songs passed down orally, such as work songs, are often narratives: this poem tells the story of a girl running back to “the mothering blackness.” The regularly indented lines also give the impression that at least two voices are speaking, which would have been the case in work songs that were almost always sung by a collective. 

“Kin” (1978)

You fought to die, thinking   

In destruction lies the seed   

Of birth. You may be right.

Angelou has written that when she uses the pronoun I, she is referring to a collective we. In “Kin,” it’s clear to see that her narrator speaks for a larger human experience. The poem, which is dedicated to her brother, is a dramatic monologue with short, unrhymed lines. It takes familial closeness as its theme, with the shared memories and shared suffering that come with being part of a group. The narrator also associates herself with three powerful females in human history and, in doing so, speaks to and for the people. 

“Phenomenal Woman” (1978)

I’m a woman

Phenomenally.

Phenomenal woman,   

That’s me.

The title of a collection and one of Angelou’s most famous poems, “Phenomenal Woman” celebrates black beauty and female strength. It’s a poem of power: when the narrator walks into a room, “The fellows stand or / Fall down on their knees.” This poem, with its expanding lines wrapped around a two-word refrain, suggests that the woman’s physical presence—her hips, step, eyes, teeth, waist, and feet—makes her powerful but also commends her “inner mystery.” Written in the 1970s toward the end of the Black Arts Movement, this celebration of black beauty confronts traditional white structures of “fashion models” and “pretty women” and replaces them with the confident narrator of “Phenomenal Woman.” 

“California Prodigal” (1978)

...Audacious   

Sunlight casts defiance

At their feet.

How does one inspire change in the face of stunning indifference? “Agile poppies” face off against “old manors” as the tension between the apathy of history and the vitality of the human spirit is explored. Even Angelou’s language takes part, shifting from her usual everyday speech to Latinate words such as fulminant, antiquitous, gelid, and the made-up word phantasmatalities. By presenting a battle between the sun and the mountains, this struggle becomes silent and daily, much like the day-to-day conflicts that Civil Rights activists encountered. The final image—a sun at the base of a mountain—is hopeful, suggesting that the sun will continue to rise, at least until it goes down for the day and the battle begins again. 

1980s

“A Plagued Journey” (1983)

Through all the bright hours   

I cling to expectation

The theme of struggle and submission reoccurs throughout Angelou’s poetry, here without exception. This narrator is utterly passive, even in the face of the personified Hope. Eventually a personified Gloom “sucks the strands” of the speaker’s hair and “forgives [her] heady / fling with Hope.” Turning these abstract feelings into greedy and arrogant figures allows Angelou to portray the narrator’s helplessness to respond in any way besides submission. 

“Caged Bird” (1983)

for the caged bird   

sings of freedom.

The caged bird serves as Angelou’s signature image, frequenting her most famous autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1979). The image is not hers originally: it’s taken from Paul Laurence Dunbar, a popular early-20th-century African American writer and another of Angelou’s influences. This poem can be read in relation to “Sympathy,” in which Dunbar describes the caged bird, a symbol for a chained slave, beating his bruised and bloody wings. Angelou revises “Sympathy” by portraying a free bird beside a caged bird. Rhyme builds throughout the poem—the first stanza is unrhymed, and only two lines rhyme in the second, but the third (the chorus) features repeated “-ill” sounds mocking birdsong. 

1990s

From “On the Pulse of Morning” (1993)

The Rock cries out to us today,   

You may stand upon me,   

But do not hide your face.

When Angelou read this poem at President Clinton’s first inauguration, she became the second poet to read a poem at a presidential inauguration and the first woman and African American to do so. At this point in her career, she had achieved great success as a spokeswoman, a writer, and an activist. This poem depicts a country on the brink of change and insists “You … have crouched too long in / The bruising darkness / Have lain too long / Facedown in ignorance, / Your mouths spilling words / Armed for slaughter.” Angelou calls for peace, harmony, and social justice for all of the marginalized in this poem and during the rest of her remarkable career.