Table Of ContentB L O O M’ S
HOW TO WRITE ABOUT
Carolyn wedin
Introduction by Harold Bloom
Maya
Angelou
Bloom’s How to Write about Maya Angelou
Copyright © 2011 by Infobase Learning
Introduction © 2011 by Harold Bloom
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Wedin, Carolyn, 1939–
Bloom’s how to write about Maya Angelou / Carolyn Wedin ; introduction by
Harold Bloom.
p. cm. — (Bloom’s how to write about literature)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60413-891-7 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4381-3898-5 (ebook)
1. Angelou, Maya—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Criticism—Authorship.
I. Bloom, Harold. II. Title. III. Title: How to write about Maya Angelou.
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2011019831
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Contents
Series Introduction v
Volume Introduction vii
How to Write a Good Essay 1
How to Write about Maya Angelou 53
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings 67
Gather Together in My Name 87
Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas 105
The Heart of a Woman 122
All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes 140
A Song Flung Up to Heaven 157
Poetry 172
Essays 190
Children’s Books, Screenplays, Plays, and Documentaries 199
Index 209
series
introduCtion
Bloom’s How to Write about Literature series is designed to inspire
students to write fine essays on great writers and their works. Each
volume in the series begins with an introduction by Harold Bloom, medi-
tating on the challenges and rewards of writing about the volume’s sub-
ject author. The first chapter then provides detailed instructions on how
to write a good essay, including how to find a thesis; how to develop an
outline; how to write a good introduction, body text, and conclusions;
how to cite sources; and more. The second chapter provides a brief over-
view of the issues involved in writing about the subject author and then
a number of suggestions for paper topics, with accompanying strategies
for addressing each topic. Succeeding chapters cover the author’s major
works.
The paper topics suggested in this book are open ended, and the brief
strategies provided are designed to give students a push forward on the
writing process rather than a road map to success. The aim of the book
is to pose questions, not answer them. Many different kinds of papers
could result from each topic. As always, the success of each paper will
depend completely on the writer’s skill and imagination.
v
How to write about
Maya angelou:
introduCtion
by Harold Bloom
Maya Angelou’s achievement, more even in her ongoing autobi-
ography than in her verse, has a complex relation to at least two
among the principal antecedents of African-American memoirs: the slave
narrative and the church sermon. Since she is a spellbinder of a story-
teller, other elements in African-American tradition, including the blues
and the oral eloquence of street ways, also enter into her work. Though
Angelou is essentially a secular biographer, her extraordinary and per-
sistent sense of self, one that rises both through and above experience,
seems to me to go back to the African-American paradigm of what I have
called the American Religion. What survived of West African spiritual-
ity, after the torments of the Middle Passage from Africa to America,
was the gnosis that early black Baptists in America spoke of as “the little
me within the big me.” Though converted to the slaveowners’ ostensible
Christianity, they transformed that European faith by a radical “know-
ing” that the “little me” or most inward self did not stem from the harsh
space and time of the white world but emanated ultimately from their
unfallen cosmos that preceded the Creation-Fall of the whites. Angelou’s
pervasive sense that what is oldest and best in her own spirit derives
from a lost, black fullness of being is one of the strongest manifestations
in African-American literature of this ancient gnosis.
vii
viii Bloom’s How to Write about Maya Angelou
I think that this is part of the secret of Angelou’s enormous appeal
to American readers, whether white or black, because her remarkable
literary voice speaks to something in the universal American “little me
within the big me.” Most Americans, of whatever race or ethnic origin,
share the sense that experience, however terrible, can be endured because
their deepest self is beyond experience and so cannot be destroyed. Par-
ticularly in her best book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou
achieves an almost unique tone that blends intimacy and detachment, a
tone indeed of assured serenity that transcends the fearful humiliations
and outrages that she suffered as a girl. Hundreds of thousands of read-
ers have found in Caged Bird an implicit image of the resurrection of
their own innermost self, a fragment of divinity that transcended natural
birth and so can never die.
Maya Angelou’s poetry also has a large public. It is, in every sense,
“popular poetry” and makes no formal or cognitive demands on the
reader. Of Angelou’s sincerity, good will toward all, and personal vitality,
there can be no doubt. She is professedly an inspirational writer, of the
self-help variety, which perhaps places her beyond criticism.
Her lyric cadences, to my ear, have little resemblance to the blues and
seem closer to country music. Angelou’s most persuasive defender is the
scholar-critic Robert B. Stepto, who carefully distinguishes her use of
folk idioms and forms from her weaker work. Stepto essentially asks us
to yield to Angelou’s self-presentation and thus to import the autobio-
graphical volumes back into the weaker poems.
Angelou seems best at ballads, the most traditional kind of popular
poetry, which link her to folk traditions. The function of such work is nec-
essarily social rather than aesthetic, particularly in an era totally domi-
nated by visual media. One has to be grateful for the benignity, humor,
and wholeheartedness of Angelou’s project, even if her autobiographical
prose necessarily centers her achievement. She is a passionately sincere
poet, whose purpose is to inspire her audience to keep going.
How to write
a good essay
by Laurie A. Sterling and Carolyn Wedin
While there are many ways to write about literature, most assign-
ments for high school and college English classes call for analyti-
cal papers. In these assignments, you are presenting your interpretation
of a text to your reader. Your objective is to interpret the text’s meaning
in order to enhance your reader’s understanding and enjoyment of the
work. Without exception, strong papers about the meaning of a literary
work are built upon a careful, close reading of the text or texts. Careful,
analytical reading should always be the first step in your writing process.
This volume provides models of such close, analytical reading, and these
should help you develop your own skills as a reader and as a writer.
As the examples throughout this book demonstrate, attentive reading
entails thinking about and evaluating the formal (textual) aspects of the
author’s works: theme, character, form, and language. In addition, when
writing about a work, many readers choose to move beyond the text itself
to consider the work’s cultural context. In these instances, writers might
explore the historical circumstances of the time period in which the
work was written. Alternatively, they might examine the philosophies
and ideas that a work addresses. Even in cases where writers explore a
work’s cultural context, though, papers must still address the more for-
mal aspects of the work itself. A good interpretative essay that evaluates
Shakespeare’s use of argument in Cymbeline cannot simply give a history
of the Gallic wars without firmly grounding this discussion in the play
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