American Poets Whitman Hughes Angelou
Jestice/English 3AmericanPoetsWalt WhitmanLangston HughesMaya Angelou
Jestice/English 3Walt WhitmanPoet Details1819–1892http://whitmanarchive.orgWalt Whitman is America’s world poet—a latter-day successor to Homer, Virgil, Dante,and Shakespeare. In Leaves of Grass (1855), he celebrated democracy, nature, love, andfriendship. This monumental work chanted praises to the body as well as to the soul,and found beauty and reassurance even in death.Along with Emily Dickinson, Whitman is regarded as one of America’s most significantnineteenth century poets. Born on Long Island, Whitman grew up in Brooklyn andreceived limited formal education. His occupations during his lifetime included printer,schoolteacher, reporter, and editor. Whitman’s self-published Leaves of Grass wasinspired in part by his travels through the American frontier and by his admirationfor Ralph Waldo Emerson. This important publication underwent eight subsequenteditions during his lifetime as Whitman expanded and revised the poetry and addedmore to the original collection of twelve poems. Emerson himself declared the firstedition was “the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yetcontributed.”Whitman published his own enthusiastic review of Leaves of Grass. Critics and readersalike, however, found both Whitman’s style and subject matter unnerving. According toThe Longman Anthology of Poetry, “Whitman received little public acclaim for his poemsduring his lifetime for several reasons: this openness regarding sex, his selfpresentation as a rough working man, and his stylistic innovations.” A poet who“abandoned the regular meter and rhyme patterns” of his contemporaries, Whitman
Jestice/English 3was “influenced by the long cadences and rhetorical strategies of Biblical poetry.” Uponpublishing Leaves of Grass, Whitman was subsequently fired from his job with theDepartment of the Interior. Despite his mixed critical reception in the U.S., he wasfavorably received in England, with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon CharlesSwinburne among the British writers who celebrated his work.During the Civil War, Whitman worked as a clerk in Washington, DC. For three years,he visited soldiers during his spare time, dressing wounds and giving solace to theinjured. These experiences led to the poems in his 1865 publication, Drum-Taps, whichincludes, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” Whitman’s elegy for PresidentLincoln.After suffering a serious stroke in 1873, Whitman moved to his brother’s home inCamden, New Jersey. While his poetry failed to garner popular attention from hisAmerican readership during his lifetime, over 1,000 people came to view his funeral.And as the first writer of a truly American poetry, Whitman’s legacy endures. Accordingto The Longman Anthology of Poetry, Whitman’s “ambition, expansiveness, and embraceof all the high and low features of American life influenced many poets of the twentiethcentury, including D.H. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, and AllenGinsberg.”You can read and inspect many of Whitman's books, letters, and manuscripts at the WaltWhitman Archive, a digital edition at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, directed by EdFolsom and Kenneth M. Price.
Jestice/English 3I Hear America SingingBY WALT WHITMANI hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blitheand strong,The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leavesoff work,The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, thedeckhand singing on the steamboat deck,The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hattersinging as he stands,The wood-cutter’s song, the ploughboy’s on his way in themorning, or at noon intermission or at sundown,The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife atwork, or of the girl sewing or washing,Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of youngfellows, robust, friendly,Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.Source: Selected Poems (1991)
Jestice/English 3Langston HughesPoet Details1902–1967Langston Hughes was first recognized as an important literary figure during the 1920s, aperiod known as the "Harlem Renaissance" because of the number of emerging blackwriters. Du Bose Heyward wrote in the New York Herald Tribune in 1926: "LangstonHughes, although only twenty-four years old, is already conspicuous in the group ofNegro intellectuals who are dignifying Harlem with a genuine art life. . . . It is, however,as an individual poet, not as a member of a new and interesting literary group, or as aspokesman for a race that Langston Hughes must stand or fall. . . . Always intenselysubjective, passionate, keenly sensitive to beauty and possessed of an unfalteringmusical sense, Langston Hughes has given us a 'first book' that marks the opening of acareer well worth watching."Despite Heyward's statement, much of Hughes's early work was roundly criticized bymany black intellectuals for portraying what they thought to be an unattractive view ofblack life. In his autobiographical The Big Sea, Hughes commented: "Fine Clothes to theJew was well received by the literary magazines and the white press, but the Negrocritics did not like it at all. The Pittsburgh Courier ran a big headline across the top of thepage, LANGSTON HUGHES' BOOK OF POEMS TRASH. The headline in the NewYork Amsterdam News was LANGSTON HUGHES—THE SEWER DWELLER. TheChicago Whip characterized me as 'the poet low-rate of Harlem.' Others called the book adisgrace to the race, a return to the dialect tradition, and a parading of all our racialdefects before the public. . . . The Negro critics and many of the intellectuals were verysensitive about their race in books. (And still are.) In anything that white people werelikely to read, they wanted to put their best foot forward, their politely polished andcultural foot—and only that foot."An example of the type of criticism of which Hughes was writing is Estace Gay's
Jestice/English 3comments on Fine Clothes to the Jew. "It does not matter to me whether every poem inthe book is true to life," Gay wrote. "Why should it be paraded before the Americanpublic by a Negro author as being typical or representative of the Negro? Bad enough tohave white authors holding up our imperfections to public gaze. Our aim ought to be[to] present to the general public, already misinformed both by well meaning andmalicious writers, our higher aims and aspirations, and our better selves." Commentingon reviewers like Gay, Hughes wrote: "I sympathized deeply with those critics and thoseintellectuals, and I saw clearly the need for some of the kinds of books they wanted. ButI did not see how they could expect every Negro author to write such books. Certainly, Ipersonally knew very few people anywhere who were wholly beautiful and wholly good.Besides I felt that the masses of our people had as much in their lives to put into booksas did those more fortunate ones who had been born with some means and the ability towork up to a master's degree at a Northern college. Anyway, I didn't know the upperclass Negroes well enough to write much about them. I knew only the people I hadgrown up with, and they weren't people whose shoes were always shined, who had beento Harvard, or who had heard of Bach. But they seemed to me good people, too."Hoyt W. Fuller commented that Hughes "chose to identify with plain black people—notbecause it required less effort and sophistication, but precisely because he saw moretruth and profound significance in doing so. Perhaps in this he was inversely influencedby his father—who, frustrated by being the object of scorn in his native land, rejected hisown people. Perhaps the poet's reaction to his father's flight from the American racialreality drove him to embrace it with extra fervor." (Langston Hughes's parents separatedshortly after his birth and his father moved to Mexico. The elder Hughes came to feel adeep dislike and revulsion for other American blacks.) In Hughes's own words, hispoetry is about "workers, roustabouts, and singers, and job hunters on Lenox Avenue inNew York, or Seventh Street in Washington or South State in Chicago—people up todayand down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled, butdetermined not to be wholly beaten, buying furniture on the installment plan, filling thehouse with roomers to help pay the rent, hoping to get a new suit for Easter—andpawning that suit before the Fourth of July."In fact, the title Fine Clothes to the Jew, which was misunderstood and disliked by manypeople, was derived from the Harlemites Hughes saw pawning their own clothing; mostof the pawn shops and other stores in Harlem at that time were owned by Jewish people.Lindsay Patterson, a novelist who served as Hughes's assistant, believed that Hugheswas "critically, the most abused poet in America. . . . Serious white critics ignored him,less serious ones compared his poetry to Cassius Clay doggerel, and most black criticsonly grudgingly admired him. Some, like James Baldwin, were downright maliciousabout his poetic achievement. But long after Baldwin and the rest of us are gone, Isuspect Hughes' poetry will be blatantly around growing in stature until it is recognizedfor its genius. Hughes' tragedy was double-edged: he was unashamedly black at a timewhen blackness was demode, and he didn't go much beyond one of his earliest themes,black is beautiful. He had the wit and intelligence to explore the black human conditionin a variety of depths, but his tastes and selectivity were not always accurate, andpressures to survive as a black writer in a white society (and it was a miracle that he didfor so long) extracted an enormous creative toll."
Jestice/English 3Nevertheless, Hughes, more than any other black poet or writer, recorded faithfully thenuances of black life and its frustrations. Although Hughes had trouble with both blackand white critics, he was the first black American to earn his living solely from hiswriting and public lectures. Part of the reason he was able to do this was thephenomenal acceptance and love he received from average black people. A reviewerfor Black World noted in 1970: "Those whose prerogative it is to determine the rank ofwriters have never rated him highly, but if the weight of public response is any gaugethen Langston Hughes stands at the apex of literary relevance among Black people. Thepoet occupies such a position in the memory of his people precisely because herecognized that 'we possess within ourselves a great reservoir of physical and spiritualstrength,' and because he used his artistry to reflect this back to the people. He used hispoetry and prose to illustrate that 'there is no lack within the Negro people of beauty,strength and power,' and he chose to do so on their own level, on their own terms."Hughes brought a varied and colorful background to his writing. Before he was twelveyears old he had lived in six different American cities. When his first book waspublished, he had already been a truck farmer, cook, waiter, college graduate, sailor, anddoorman at a nightclub in Paris, and had visited Mexico, West Africa, the Azores, theCanary Islands, Holland, France, and Italy. As David Littlejohn observed in his Black onWhite: A Critical Survey of Writing by American Negroes: "On the whole, Hughes' creativelife [was] as full, as varied, and as original as Picasso's, a joyful, honest monument of acareer. There [was] no noticeable sham in it, no pretension, no self-deceit; but a great,great deal of delight and smiling irresistible wit. If he seems for the moment upstaged byangrier men, by more complex artists, if 'different views engage' us, necessarily, at thistrying stage of the race war, he may well outlive them all, and still be there when it'sover. . . . Hughes' [greatness] seems to derive from his anonymous unity with his people.He seems to speak for millions, which is a tricky thing to do."Hughes reached many people through his popular fictional character, Jesse B. Semple(shortened to Simple). Simple is a poor man who lives in Harlem, a kind of comic nogood, a stereotype Hughes turned to advantage. He tells his stories to Boyd, the foil inthe stories who is a writer much like Hughes, in return for a drink. His tales of histroubles with work, women, money, and life in general often reveal, through their verysimplicity, the problems of being a poor black man in a racist society. "White folks,"Simple once commented, "is the cause of a lot of inconvenience in my life." Simple'smusings first appeared in 1942 in "From Here to Yonder," a column Hughes wrote forthe Chicago Defender and later for the New York Post. According to a reviewer for KirkusReviews, their original intent was "to convince black Americans to support the U.S. wareffort." They were later published in several volumes.A more recent collection, 1994's The Return of Simple, contains previously unpublishedmaterial but remains current in its themes, according to a Publishers Weekly critic whonoted Simple's addressing of such issues as political correctness, children's rights, andthe racist undercurrent behind contraception and sterilization proposals. Donald C.Dickinson wrote in his Bio-Bibliography of Langston Hughes that the "charm of Simple liesin his uninhibited pursuit of those two universal goals, understanding and security. As
Jestice/English 3with most other humans, he usually fails to achieve either of these goals and sometimesonce achieved they disappoint him. . . . Simple has a tough resilience, however, thatwon't allow him to brood over a failure very long. . . . Simple is a well-developedcharacter, both believable and lovable. The situations he meets and discusses are so trueto life everyone may enter the fun. This does not mean that Simple is in any way dull. Heinjects the ordinary with his own special insights. . . . Simple is a natural,unsophisticated man who never abandons his hope in tomorrow." A reviewer for BlackWorld commented on the popularity of Simple: "The people responded. Simple lived in aworld they knew, suffered their pangs, experienced their joys, reasoned in their way,talked their talk, dreamed their dreams, laughed their laughs, voiced their fears—and allthe while underneath, he affirmed the wisdom which anchored at the base of their lives.It was not that ideas and events and places and people beyond the limits of Harlem—allof the Harlems—did not concern him; these things, indeed, were a part of hisconsciousness; but Simple's rock-solid commonsense enabled him to deal with themwith balance and intelligence. . . . Simple knows who he is and what he is, and he knowsthat the status of expatriate offers no solution, no balm. The struggle is here, and it canonly be won here, and no constructive end is served through fantasies and illusions andfalse efforts at disguising a basic sense of inadequacy. Simple also knows that thestrength, the tenacity, the commitment which are necessary to win the struggle alsoexist within the Black community." Hoyt W. Fuller believed that, like Simple, "the key toLangston Hughes . . . was the poet's deceptive and profound simplicity. Profound becauseit was both willed and ineffable, because some intuitive sense even at the beginning ofhis adulthood taught him that humanity was of the essence and that it existedundiminished in all shapes, sizes, colors and conditions. Violations of that humanityoffended his unshakable conviction that mankind is possessed of the divinity of God."It was Hughes's belief in humanity and his hope for a world in which people couldsanely and with understanding live together that led to his decline in popularity in theracially turbulent latter years of his life. Unlike younger and more militant writers,Hughes never lost his conviction that "most people are generally good, in every race andin every country where I have been." Reviewing The Panther and the Lash: Poems of OurTimes in Poetry, Laurence Lieberman recognized that Hughes's "sensibility [had] keptpace with the times," but he criticized his lack of a personal political stance."Regrettably, in different poems, he is fatally prone to sympathize with starklyantithetical politics of race," Lieberman commented. "A reader can appreciate hiscatholicity, his tolerance of all the rival—and mutually hostile—views of his outspokencompatriots, from Martin Luther King to Stokely Carmichael, but we are tempted to ask,what are Hughes' politics? And if he has none, why not? The age demands intellectualcommitment from its spokesmen. A poetry whose chief claim on our attention is moral,rather than aesthetic, must take sides politically."Despite some recent criticism, Hughes's position in the American literary scene seems tobe secure. David Littlejohn wrote that Hughes is "the one sure Negro classic, morecertain of permanence than even Baldwin or Ellison or Wright. . . . His voice is as sure,his manner as original, his position as secure as, say Edwin Arlington Robinson'sor Robinson Jeffers'. . . . By molding his verse always on the sounds of Negro talk, therhythms of Negro music, by retaining his own keen honesty and directness, his poetic
Jestice/English 3sense and ironic intelligence, he maintained through four decades a readable newnessdistinctly his own."The Block and The Sweet and Sour Animal Book are posthumously published collections ofHughes's poetry for children that position his words against a backdrop of visual art. TheBlock pairs Hughes's poems with a series of six collages by Romare Bearden that bearsthe book's title. The Sweet and Sour Animal Book contains previously unpublished andrepeatedly rejected poetry of Hughes from the 1930s. Here, the editors have combined itwith the artwork of elementary school children at the Harlem School of the Arts. Theresults, noted Veronica Chambers in the New York Times Book Review, "reflect Hughes'schildlike wonder as well as his sense of humor." Chambers also commented on therhythms of Hughes's words, noting that "children love a good rhyme" and that Hughesgave them "just a simple but seductive taste of the blues." Hughes's poems have beentranslated into German, French, Spanish, Russian, Yiddish, and Czech; many of themhave been set to music.Donald B. Gibson noted in the introduction to Modern Black Poets: A Collection of CriticalEssays that Hughes "has perhaps the greatest reputation (worldwide) that any blackwriter has ever had. Hughes differed from most of his predecessors among black poets,and (until recently) from those who followed him as well, in that he addressed his poetryto the people, specifically to black people. During the twenties when most Americanpoets were turning inward, writing obscure and esoteric poetry to an ever decreasingaudience of readers, Hughes was turning outward, using language and themes, attitudesand ideas familiar to anyone who had the ability simply to read. He has been, unlikemost nonblack poets other than Walt Whitman, Vachel Lindsay, and Carl Sandburg, a poetof the people. . . . Until the time of his death, he spread his message humorously—though always seriously—to audiences throughout the country, having read his poetry tomore people (possibly) than any other American poet."
Jestice/English 3I, TooBY LANGSTON HUGHESI, too, sing America.I am the darker brother.They send me to eat in the kitchenWhen company comes,But I laugh,And eat well,And grow strong.Tomorrow,I’ll be at the tableWhen company comes.Nobody’ll dareSay to me,“Eat in the kitchen,”Then.Besides,They’ll see how beautiful I amAnd be ashamed—I, too, am America.
Jestice/English 3Let America Be America AgainLangston Hughes, 1902 - 1967Let America be America again.Let it be the dream it used to be.Let it be the pioneer on the plainSeeking a home where he himself is free.(America never was America to me.)Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—Let it be that great strong land of loveWhere never kings connive nor tyrants schemeThat any man be crushed by one above.(It never was America to me.)O, let my land be a land where LibertyIs crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
Jestice/English 3But opportunity is real, and life is free,Equality is in the air we breathe.(There’s never been equality for me,Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.I am the red man driven from the land,I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—And finding only the same old stupid planOf dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.I am the young man, full of strength and hope,Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Jestice/English 3Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!Of work the men! Of take the pay!Of owning everything for one’s own greed!I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.I am the worker sold to the machine.I am the Negro, servant to you all.I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—Hungry yet today despite the dream.Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!I am the man who never got ahead,The poorest worker bartered through the years.Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dreamIn the Old World while still a serf of kings,Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,That even yet its mighty daring sings
Jestice/English 3In every brick and stone, in every furrow turnedThat’s made America the land it has become.O, I’m the man who sailed those early seasIn search of what I meant to be my home—For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,And torn from Black Africa’s strand I cameTo build a “homeland of the free.”The free?Who said the free? Not me?Surely not me? The millions on relief today?The millions shot down when we strike?The millions who have nothing for our pay?For all the dreams we’ve dreamedAnd all the songs we’ve sungAnd all the hopes we’ve held
Jestice/English 3And all the flags we’ve hung,The millions who have nothing for our pay—Except the dream that’s almost dead today.O, let America be America again—The land that never has been yet—And yet must be—the land where every man is free.The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—Who made America,Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,Must bring back our mighty dream again.Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—The steel of freedom does not stain.From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,We must take back our land again,America!
Jestice/English 3O, yes,I say it plain,America never was America to me,And yet I swear this oath—America will be!Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,We, the people, must redeemThe land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.The mountains and the endless plain—All, all the stretch of these great green states—And make America again!
Jestice/English 3Maya AngelouPoet Details1928–2014http://mayaangelou.com/An acclaimed American poet, storyteller, activist, and autobiographer, Maya Angelouwas born Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri. Angelou has had a broad career asa singer, dancer, actress, composer, and Hollywood's first female black director, but ismost famous as a writer, editor, essayist, playwright, and poet. As a civil rights activist,Angelou worked for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. She was also aneducator and served as the Reynolds professor of American Studies at Wake ForestUniversity. By 1975, wrote Carol E. Neubauer in Southern Women Writers: The NewGeneration, "Angelou had become recognized not only as a spokesperson for blacks andwomen, but also for all people who are committed to raising the moral standards ofliving in the United States." She served on two presidential committees, for Gerald Ford in1975 and for Jimmy Carter in 1977. In 2000, Angelou was awarded the National Medal ofArts by President Bill Clinton. In 2010, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom,the highest civilian honor in the U.S., by President Barack Obama. Angelou was awarded over50 honorary degrees.Angelou’s most famous work, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), deals with herearly years in Long Beach, St. Louis and Stamps, Arkansas, where she lived with herbrother and paternal grandmother. In one of its most evocative (and controversial)moments, Angelou describes how she was first cuddled then raped by her mother'sboyfriend when she was just seven years old. When the man was murdered by heruncles for his crime, Angelou felt responsible, and stopped talking. Angelou remainedmute for five years, but developed a love for language. She read black authorslike Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar, as well as canonicalworks by William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and Edgar Allan Poe. When Angelou was
Jestice/English 3twelve and a half, Mrs. Flowers, an educated black woman, finally got her to speakagain. Mrs. Flowers, as Angelou recalled in her children’s book Mrs. Flowers: A Moment ofFriendship (1986), emphasized the importance of the spoken word, explained the natureof and importance of education, and instilled in her a love of poetry. Angelou graduatedat the top of her eighth-grade class.Angelou attended George Washington High School in San Francisco and took lessons indance and drama on a scholarship at the California Labor School. When Angelou, just17, graduated from high school and gave birth to a son, Guy, she began to work as thefirst female and black street car conductor in San Francisco. As she explained in Singin'and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry like Christmas (1976), the third of her autobiographies, shealso "worked as a shake dancer in night clubs, fry cook in hamburger joints, dinner cookin a Creole restaurant and once had a job in a mechanic's shop, taking the paint off carswith my hands." Angelou married a white ex-sailor, Tosh Angelos, in 1950. After theyseparated, Angelou continued her study of dance in New York City, returning to SanFrancisco to sing in the Purple Onion cabaret and garnering the attention of talentscouts. From 1954 to 1955, she was a member of the cast of a touring productionof Porgy and Bess. During the late 1950s, Angelou sang in West Coast and Hawaiiannightclubs, before returning to New York to continue her stage career.Angelou joined the Harlem Writers Guild in the late 1950s and met James Baldwin andother important writers. It was during this time that Angelou had the opportunity tohear Dr. Martin Luther King speak. Inspired by his message, she decided to become apart of the struggle for civil rights. She was offered a position as the northerncoordinator for Dr. King's SCLC. Following her work for Dr. King, Angelou moved toCairo with her son, and, in 1962, to Ghana in West Africa. She worked as a freelancewriter and was a feature editor at the African Review. When Angelou returned to theUnited States in the mid-1960s, she was encouraged by author James Baldwin andRobert Loomis, an editor at Random House, to write an autobiography. Initially,Angelou declined the offers, but eventually changed her mind and wrote I Know Why theCaged Bird Sings. The book chronicles Angelou's childhood and ends with the birth of herson. It won immediate success and was nominated for a National Book Award.I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is the first of Angelou’s six autobiographies. It is widelytaught in schools, though it has faced controversy over its portrayal of race, sexual abuseand violence. Angelou’s use of fiction-writing techniques like dialogue and plot in herautobiographies was innovative for its time and helped, in part, to complicate thegenre’s relationship with truth and memory. Though her books are episodic and tightlycrafted, the events seldom follow a strict chronology and are arranged to emphasizethemes. Most critics have judged Angelou’s subsequent autobiographies in light of herfirst, and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings remains the most highly praised. Othervolumes include Gather Together in My Name (1974), which begins when Angelou isseventeen and a new mother; Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry like Christmas, anaccount of her tour in Europe and Africa with Porgy and Bess; The Heart of aWoman (1981), a description of Angelou’s acting and writing career in New York and herwork for the civil rights movement; and All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986),which recounts Angelou's travels in West Africa and her decision to return, without her
Jestice/English 3son, to America.It took Angelou 15 years to write the final volume of her autobiography, A Song Flung upto Heaven (2002). The book covers four years, from the time Angelou returned fromGhana in 1964 through the moment when she sat down at her mother's table and beganto write I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in 1968. Angelou hesitated so long to start thebook and took so long to finish it, she told Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service interviewerSherryl Connelly, because so many painful things happened to her, and to the entireAfrican-American community, in those four years. "I didn't know how to write it," shesaid. "I didn't see how the assassination of Malcolm [X], the Watts riot, the breakup of alove affair, then [the assassination of Dr.] Martin [Luther] King [Jr.], how I could get allthat loose with something uplifting in it." A Song Flung up to Heaven deals forthrightlywith these events, and "the poignant beauty of Angelou's writing enhances rather thanmasks the candor with which she addresses the racial crisis through which America waspassing," Wayne A. Holst wrote in Christian Century.Angelou was also a prolific and widely-read poet, and her po
Maya Angelou . Jestice/English 3 Walt Whitman Poet Details 1819–1892 . American readership during his lifetime, over 1,000 people came to view his funeral. And as the first writer of a truly American poetry, Whitman’s legacy endures. According to The Longman Anthology of Poetry, .
secondary data source. The primary data source of the study is Maya Angelou’s poem itself, from the collection of Maya Angelou published in 1994. The secondary data sources are Biography of the author Maya Angelou, websites in the internet about Maya Angelou,
and feminist scholarship, Whitman and modernism, Whitman and the poet- ics of address, Whitman and the poetics of present participles, Whitman and Borges, Whitman and Isadora Duncan, Whitman and the Civil War, Whit- man and the poli
Death, Disillusionment and Despair in Maya Angelou’s I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings 556 Warmly but not too familiarly” (Caged Bird 10). Angelou was all alone during her early life in Stamps. Here, Angelou shows the deep bonding inherent within the African American social set up that protects its own people from the hostile environment.
Biography Maya Angelou Maya Angelou is a poet and award-winning author known for her acclaimed memoir “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” and her numerous poetry and essay collections Maya Angelou was born on April 4, 1928, in St. Lo
Authors: Maya Angelou Maya Angelou reciting her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" at President Bill Clinton's inauguration in 1993. Courtesy, William J. Clinton Presidential Library Synopsis: Maya Angelou was born
Christian home and she was taught discipline, self-denial and strict integrity. . founder of S&S funeral services in Jackson, TN and Springfield chapel in Corinth MS. In 2013, Cora, while working at S&S Funeral Services, met Bishop Solomon Whitman. . (Bud) Whitman, Levert Whitman, Allen Spencer Whitman and Gerry Keith (Ruthie) Whitman, one
The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes (2011) edited by Gifford offers comprehensive critical survey regarding the major themes in Hughes‟s poetry and . Survey of Literature: Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and Dylan Thomas . , and Ted Hughes Ted Hughes. Seamus Heaney, , .
Andreas Wimmer, Indra de Soysa, Christian Wagner Number 61 Political Science Tools for Assessing Feasibility and Sustainability of Reforms ZEF – Discussion Papers on Development Policy Bonn, February 2003. The CENTER FORDEVELOPMENT RESEARCH (ZEF) was established in 1997 as an international, interdisciplinary research institute at the University of Bonn. Research and teaching at ZEF aims to .
