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Maya Angelou is known as the “most visible black female autobiographer/poet.” She was born, Marguerite Ann Johnson, on April fourth, 1928 in St. Louis, Missouri. Her parents divorced when she was three, and she and her brother were sent to live with their grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. Seeing all the racial discrimination in the American south strengthened her passion for poetry, music, dance and performance. Maya writes about the struggles people face, racism and freedom. At age eight, Angelou went mute for five years when she believed that her words killed a man. These years of silence helped develop her extraordinary memory, love for books and literature, and her ability to listen and observe the world around her. At age fourteen, Angelou dropped out of high school to be San Francisco’s first African-American cable car conductor. Maya returned to school, but became pregnant and graduated a few weeks before giving birth to her son Guy. She left her home to raise her son as a single mother. During this time Angelou worked as a waitress, and a cook, to make a living for her and her son. When Martin Luther king Jr. was assassinated on her fortieth birthday, it left her devastated, but also determined to keep the civil rights movement going so everyone could have equality in the United States. The poem, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” by the poet Maya Angelou, uses the following poetic devices: symbolism and lyric that give meaning to poem. The first poetic device that this poem shows is symbolism. Symbolism is when an author or poet uses a person, place, thing or an event to represent something else. An example of
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symbolism from the poem would be “The caged bird sings with fearful trill of the things unknown but longed for still and is tune is heard on the distant hill for the caged bird sings of freedom” (Angelou lines:15-21). Symbolism makes the poem better by challenging you to think beyond the poem to realize that the caged bird is a symbol of hope or determination. The second poetic device that Maya Angelou shows is lyric. Lyric is poetry that gives emotion. An example of lyric in the poem is “But a bird that stalks down his narrow cage can seldom see through his bars of rage his wings are clipped and his feet are tied so he opens his throat to sing.”(Angelou 8-14). Lyric makes the poem more serious and helps express the poet’s feelings about racism better. It adds emphasis by showing how one bird is free and the other is trapped and restricted. The speaker of the poem is the poet. The speaker of the poem is Maya Angelou because she is telling what it is like to be free or trapped. An example would be “The free bird leaps on the back of the win” (Angelou1-2).the theme of the poem is that being able to do your own things and make your own decisions, is better than being trapped and struggling. An example of this would be “But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams” (Angelou 26) and “The free bird thinks of another breeze” (Angelou 22), because the free bird represents the white race and the caged bird represents the black race. In Maya Angelou’s poem, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”, she uses symbolism and lyric as poetic devices to bring meaning to the poem.
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Racism and Struggles
An Analysis of “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou.

Poet Essay
March 19, 2012
Word count: 575
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Work cited
A&E Television Networks.”Maya Angelou Biography.” www.biography.com. 2012
American Academy of Achievement. “Maya Angelou Biography” wwww.achievement.org
31 May 1996