In the following excerpt, Hagen presents an anatomy of Angelou's poetry and its subject matter.

In the following essay, Ramsey argues that Angelou creates transcendent meaning from oppressive experience in her poetry.

In the following excerpt, Erikson explores Angelou's remarks on Shakespeare, and their implications, challenging how they were employed by Lynne Cheney, Ronald Reagan's director of the National Endowment for the Humanities, in a report about the conflict in academia over determining the scope, nature, and value of the Western Literary Canon.

In the following interview, originally conducted in 1983, Angelou discusses the influence of other writers, social conditions, and her own experience upon her work.

In the following interview, originally conducted in 1981, Angelou talks about her writing habits and the values by which she is guided, and those which she wishes to pass on.

Maya Angelou's autobiography, like [Richard] Wright's, opens with a primal childhood scene that brings into focus the nature of the imprisoning environment from which the self will seek escape. The black girl child is trapped within the cage of her own diminished self-image around which interlock the bars of natural and social forces. The oppression of natural forces, of physical appearance and processes, foists a self-consciousness on all young girls who must grow from children into women. Ha...

In the following essay, Coulthard argues that “On the Pulse of Morning” is a bad poem, sloppy in construction, and hackneyed in content.

In the following vignette, Slivinski Lisandrelli depicts Angelou's composition and presentation of the Clinton inauguration poem “In the Pulse of Morning.”

In the following review, Stepto finds the poems in Angelou's third volume “woefully thin,” but significant because of their relation to her autobiographical writing.

In the following review, Cookson praises Angelou's use of black-speech rhythms, inflections and patterns in her poetry.

Maya Angelou's rendering of three years of her innocent, awkward, and admirably nervy late adolescence in ["Gather Together in My Name"], the second volume of her autobiography, resembles the performance of a professional dancer trying to imitate someone who can't dance. The grace and competence show through and it's hard to believe in the high incidence of failure she describes in her youth. Thus we are entertained but kept safe from the roughness and painful uncertainty ...

Maya Angelou writes like a song, and like the truth. The wisdom, rue and humor of her storytelling are borne on a lilting rhythm completely her own, the product of a born writer's senses nourished on black church singing and preaching, soft mother talk and salty street talk, and on literature: James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Shakespeare and Gorki. Her honesty is also very much her own, even when she faces bitter facts or her own youthful foolishness. In this second installment ...

[Maya Angelou begins Gather Together In My Name] with a brief history of Black American thought and culture after the second World War; it is not a precise history, certainly not history as viewed coolly and through statistics. It is not even "accurate," but viewed from the vantage of almost 30 years, as one might hear it on the streets: biased, authoritative, hip, almost wildly funny, like certain urban myths. It seems right, and if this is not history as it was, it is history as it should ha...

I can't help feeling that Maya Angelou's career has suffered from the interest her publishers have in mythologizing her. Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well is such a painfully untalented collection of poems that I can't think of any reason, other than the Maya Myth, for it to be in print…. All this is especially depressing because Angelou … is a stunningly talented prose writer, whose marvelous I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings has quite properly become a contemporary cl...

[Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well is an] eloquent collection of poems that sing out like spirituals from the heart of the poet. She writes of love and loneliness, childhood and womanhood, communication, rejection, fairness, and justice; of Africa waking up and America still sleeping. The verses in "Pickin Em Up and Layin Em Down" catch the stomping rhythm of a fickle lover dancing his way to the next town. In "Song for the Old Ones," the Uncle Toms and Aunt Jemimas used the...

[The heroine of Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas, a] real-life memoir (that frequently borders on the light and fantastical style of comic opera) paces you through the extraordinarily eventful days and nights of her life as a single young woman who is amply gifted and clearly on the bigger-and-better-make scene. (p. 40) We accompany Angelou from city to city, from triumph to triumph, you might say, until her worries about her son (left with her mother, who is somebo...

Angelou's [And Still I Rise] enlarges on themes from her autobiographical writings and earlier poetry, although the quality of individual poems varies…. The poems that work have language close to speech or more nearly to song, while the others get mired in hackneyed metaphor and forced rhyme. Despite its unevenness, the book succeeds as a statement of one black woman's experience, and of her determination not only to survive but to grow. (p. 1640) Janet Boyarin Blundell, in...

In the following thumbnail review, Keefe praises Angelou's poems in Shaker, Why Don't You Sing?

[Gather Together in My Name] is the second volume in the story of [Maya Angelou's] life, a series that she intended to continue "every three years until she is recognized as the contemporary Black Proust." It may be that she will fall short of that avowed ambition but, if one recalls her first successful book I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings …, and reads this second one, it is apparent that Angelou is keen, sharp, earthy, imaginative, lyrical, spiritually bold, and seems destined ...

Besides the always present Angelou zest and style, a value of [Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas] is that it covers the period of her life when she made the transition from being a part-time clerk in a record store to being "somebody." The part of the book that fascinated me the most was the recounting of her tour as a featured dancer in "Porgy and Bess" when it played in Italy, France, Greece, Yugoslavia, and Egypt. Because of the cast of...