SOURCE: “Poetry: Something About Everything,” in Heart of a Woman, Mind of a Writer, and Soul of a Poet: A Critical Analysis of the Writings of Maya Angelou, University Press of America, Inc., 1997, pp. 118–36.

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

Of Maya Angelou's six published volumes of poetry, the first four have been collected into one Bantam paperback volume, titled Maya Angelou: Poems (1986). Her early practice was to alternate a prose publication with a poetry volume, and a fifth “collection” follows her fifth autobiography. Unlike the four previous volumes of poetry, this fifth work titled Now Sheba Sings the Song (1987), adds a new dimension. Here fifteen or so short poems are responses to sketches of African-American women done by artist Tom Feelings, whom Angelou has known for many years. The combined talents of these two are highly complementary and...