Maya Angelou Influences

Maya Angelou was consistent in all her literary works. Similar to her reputable five volumes autobiography, her poetry work is fundamentally concerned with the refinement of experience into directly accessible language. She essentially wrote in the endeavor to capture and preserve the factors, variations, and setting of her life story as well as that of the continuing African-American story that played a significant role shaping her and that she illuminates and reflects. Just like in her autobiography’s volumes, Angelou's poems put forward a perspective of experiences and oddity of incidents that help bring out their meaning, as opposed to being independent creations free of external, pragmatic reference. Angelou’s poems express two significant

Fundamentally, her style is more of a narrative or a story whose vocabulary is typically easy to comprehend, and not too intricate. Her poems are not always conformist: she sometimes wrote in the standard four line stanzas integrating rhyme and rhythm and other times moved away from this convention. She further portrays all types of emotions in her poetry. She utilized a dialectal form that reflected the diverse social and cultural realms that she traversed, specifically as a pioneering Black poet fluent in African American English, Homogenous English, as well as a mixture of both. Ideally, every word Angelou chose to use in her poems was a choice between the language varieties available to her. Though the majority of the text in her poems was in standardized English, she sometimes integrated one of the five other dialects she knew into her poetry work. For instance, even when using standardized English, Angelou occasionally utilized eye dialect, which was alternative spellings that express an explicit pronunciation, ensuring the dialect is visually striking through the written word. She mostly used eye dialect poetically to enable her to take on a character’s role. One of the strong influences of Angelou’s poetry was Paul Laurence Dunbar, a poet who similarly used both African-American English and Standardized