The Lesson

Poem 355 (“It was not Death, for I stood up”) by Emily Dickinson (1862)

Much like Angelou, Dickinson inventories her emotional pain and struggles to account for its tectonic impact. She sorts through experiences in her efforts to come up with a comparison to exactly how she feels in her near-despair. Like Angelou, the speaker here perseveres and, in the end, refuses to surrender to her despair.

“Life Is Fine” by Langston Hughes (1949)

Written by one of Angelou’s acknowledged influences, the poem, like “The Lesson,” speaks of the hardships and struggles of life drawing on but no particular to the African American experience in racist America. Using irony, which Angelou’s speaker resists, Hughes’s speaker, contemplating death by suicide, struggles through to the epiphanic understand that life is fine despite the anxieties and heartaches.

“Still I Rise” by Maya Angelou (1978)

Published in the same collection as “The Lesson,” this poem gives voice to Angelou’s sense of sassy self-confidence and joyous refusal to surrender to the influence of others who seek to belittle her. More specifically directed at racists, the poem nevertheless celebrates the empowerment of the self.

“The Hill We Climb” by Amanda Gorman (2021)

America’s Youth Poet Laureate, Gorman, influenced by Angelou’s body of work, presented this inspirational poem at the presidential inauguration of Joe Biden. In open verse lines that recall Angelou’s, Gorman echoes Angelou’s sense of common humanity and the need for Americans to come together to face the problems of racism, environmental destruction, sexism, and hate.