strength inspirational maya angelou poems

I have Asian ones, I have Jewish ones, I have Muslim ones.Īsk for what you want and be prepared to get it! I have white ones and Black ones and fat ones and thin ones and pretty ones and plain. My great blessing is my son, but I have daughters. Instead, pursue the things you love doing, and then do them so well that people can’t take their eyes off you. You can only become truly accomplished at something you love. If you can’t change it, change your attitude. The children to whom we read simple stories may or may not show gratitude, but each boon we give strengthens the pillars of the world. Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away. 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. You can’t really know where you are going until you know where you have been. More Maya Angelou facts (Wikipedia page) The Best Maya Angelou Quotes Occupation: Writer, poet, civil rights, activist 85 Mother Teresa Quotes On Love, Generosity, Kindness.

270 Martin Luther King Jr Quotes On Courage, Racism, Dreams.

If I am not good to myself, how can I expect anyone else to be good to me? Maya Angelou I have found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver. When we give cheerfully and accept gratefully, everyone is blessed. Life is pure adventure, and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art. 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.This is what I am learning, at 82 years old: the main thing is to be in love with the search for truth. 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. The poem concludes with the image of an insistent drumbeat which marks the rhythm of social change which the speaker and others involved in civil rights have established.

Strength inspirational maya angelou poems