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Maya Angelou's Still I Rise

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Maya Angelou's Still I Rise
“Still I Rise” by the African-American poet Maya Angelou, written almost 40 years after the Harlem renaissance ceased, displays a variety of emotions and poetic devices. Maya Angelou incorporates her personal struggles gives the audience a sense of the determination she felt to reach equality. The reader can see her anger towards the discrimination she faced at the time.

“Still I Rise” is a type of poem called a lyric poem. Most lyric poetry expresses raw emotion and is commonly spoken in third person. Throughout the poem, the same phrase ‘I rise’ is repeated ten times. The simile “Still, like dust, I rise,” creates imagery, helping the reader to picture the rising cloud of dust in his or her mind. Angelou uses a metaphor as she compares

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