Week 4 #2 ( free entry)

I wanted to do a spotlight on one of my favorite poets

Dr. Maya Angelou

Dr. Maya Angelou was born April 4th 1928, in Saint Louis , Missouri. She was always a fan of the arts. At 14 she won a scholarship for dance and drama at San Francisco's Labor school. She dropped out and became a female car cable. She later

went back and finished high school after having her first son Guy. Maya kept Dancing, and toured with Alvin Ailey Dance troupe. She performed on television and varies stages plays. Maya Angelou Traveled the world, and from that she learned how to speak various languages. She was an activist in the civil Rights Movement and she has written and directed many movies.

I believe people love her poetry so much because it is so heart felt and came from a real place. She has gone through so many experiences, from being sexually abused as a child, to being a single mother. To even participating in the struggle for civil rights. Her poems come from a real place and are so eloquently put together that people have no choice but to fall in love with them.

Of course I had to look up her poetry style, according to Lyman B. Hagen " "Most lines of her three stanza poems are trimeter; others, particularly those in unstructured poems, are from two to four syllables long" (119). He also says that her rhythmical awareness comes from the the influences of the King James Bible, Edgar Allan poe, William Shakespere, and Langston Hughes.

http://www.biography.com/articles/Maya-Angelou-9185388 website links

http://mayaangelou.com/bio/

http://www.uncp.edu/home/canada/work/canam/angelou.htm