Analysis Of Maya Angelou's Phenomenal Woman

While analyzing Maya Angelou 's poem Phenomenal woman recognizing that she is a very strong and confident poet helps understand the meaning of the poem. Showing her confidence is one of her many aspects of this poem. The reader can infer that she really wants to show the world what makes her beautiful by expressing this in various ways. The tone of this poem is very inspiring and uplifting to allow women to read her poem and feel inspired. Angelou who is a strong confident woman who does not bother what people think about her celebrates her success in life. In Angelou 's poem Phenomenal Woman she speaks as a self-confident woman. Though she has not had that confidence her whole life. There are many reasons to why Maya Angelou wrote this

According to research, Angelou was a shake dancer at night “...she also ‘worked as a shake dancer in the nightclubs…’” (pg.2 p.2). The source goes on to say, “Angelou continued her study of dance in New York City…” (pg.2 p.2). Readers may infer that her dance and drama career is where she got some of the rhyme schemes from. Even though Angelou was great and talented at what she did she had some poets that inspired her: “She read black authors like Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar, as well as canonical works by William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and Edgar Allan Poe.” (pg1.p.2). Angelou uses fiction-writing to complicate the different types of genres relationships to help with truth and memory. “Angelou’s use of fiction-writing techniques like dialogue and plot in her autobiographies was innovative for its time and helped, in part, to complicate the genre 's relationship with truth and memory. Maya Angelou 's relation to the poem was that the entire poem was talking about her and embracing her

Even though in the first four lines of the poem Angelou has a rhyme scheme of A, A, B, A, but in the seventh line the rhyme scheme changes to A, B, A, B. Other than these two small rhyme schemes Angelou does not have a specific scheme which makes the poem a free verse poem. The reader can imagine that the overall structure of the poem could represent the curvature of a woman 's body. However, if the reader was to recognize that physical structure of the poem they could infer that the poem has five stanzas. In the first stanza, there are thirteen lines. In the second stanza, there are fourteen lines. But recognizing that there are only two lines in the second stanza may have caught the reader 's attention: “Her writing attempts to capture and preserve the determining forces, vicissitudes, and ambiance of her own story and of the ongoing African-American story, which helps to shape her and which she reflects and illuminates.” (pg.1) it makes it seem like Angelou really wanted to point out those two lines which repeat throughout the whole poem: “Phenomenal woman, / That’s me.” (lines 28-29). In the fourth stanza, there are sixteen lines. Finally, in the last stanza, there are fifteen lines. There are sixty lines throughout the whole poem. Some may notice that there are no more than eleven words in each line. The rhythm of the poem is that the same words are being used at the ends of every stanza and