Maya Angelou was a memorable female figure in history for her writing and activism. This astonishing woman was best known for her autobiographic memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and her poem, “On the Pulse of Morning”. Many people have analyzed the meanings behind her writing and criticized her work, as has this writer. Angelou was a very talented woman who knew how to speak on subjects that she felt was important for society to hear and got society to listen to her. Marguerite Annie Johnson, or as many know as Maya Angelou, was born in St. Louis, Missouri on April 4th of 1928. Her parents were divorced when she was just three years old, to which she started to live with her grandmother in Arkansas with her brother due to the parents …show more content…
During this time, she was obligated to testify after her offender was brought to trial but he had ended up beaten to death in an alley a few days later, supposedly by Maya’s uncles (Wilson). Because of this incident, Angelou went silent for years and only began to speak up again when she started to read books more due to the encouragement of a woman by the name of Bertha Flowers. Some of her favorite works were written by Edgar Allan Poe, William Shakespeare, Matthew Arnold, and Charles Dickens with an addition of African American poets such as Paul Lawrence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, and Langston Hughes (Wilson). It can be assumed that all of these writers and poets are what inspired Angelou to start writing her own works. Her first and only child, Clyde Johnson, was born just after she graduated high school in August of 1945 and married to Tosh Angelos in early 1950s. Once Angelou moved to New York in the late 1950s, she began doing artistic activities such as singing in an Off-Broadway play, recording albums with Liberty Records and writing (Wilson). She also started to understand how to go about taking constructive criticism on her works because she started to write more. Her work, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, was written about her …show more content…
Majority of her poetry is centered around both political and confessional themes, sometimes even the theme revolving around love. Those who have read and interpreted her writing before have seen her as a role model for women as for being someone to look up to for African Americans, relatively in groups she associates herself with; this writer also agrees that she influences these factions of people due to her relatively similar experiences. “Her autobiographies and poetry reveal a vital need to transform the elements of a stultifying and destructive personal, social, political, and historical milieu into a sensual and physical refuge” (Ramsey). This quote generally means that Angelou’s work has more tragic and troubling themes, but she’s able to convert them into something that gradually comforts her audience of the topics she’s discussing. African Americans are the group that mostly connects and better understands Angelou and her poetry because many of her works focus around Black history. The message she tries to insight through her writing towards this group of people is to stop the assault on black people and recognize their humanness (Ramsey). In other poems where she’s focused on the subject of men and the idea of love, many expect her to write in an angry tone or bitterly because of her painful experiences centered around men, but she speaks the ideas without that assumed