When selecting a title, Angelou turned to Paul Laurence Dunbar, an African American poet whose works she had admired for years. Jazz vocalist and civil rights activist Abbey Lincoln suggested the title. According to Lyman B. Hagen, the title pulls Angelou's readers into the book while reminding them that it is possible to both lose control of one's life and to have one's freedom taken from them. Angelou has credited Dunbar, along with Shakespeare, with forming her "writing ambition". The title of the book comes from the third stanza of Dunbar's poem "Sympathy": I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,When he beats his bars and would be free;It is not a carol of joy or glee,But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core,But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings – I know why the caged bird sings.
Title
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Title
The title of the book comes from the third stanza of Dunbar's poem "Sympathy". According to Lyman B. Hagen, the title pulls Angelou's readers into the book while reminding them that it is possible to both lose control of one's life and to have one's freedom taken from them The title of the book comes from the third stanza of Dunbar's poem "Sympathy" The title of the book comes from the third stanza of Dunbar's poem "Sympathy"
when was i know why the caged bird sings poem written
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1969
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who was the author?
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Maya Angelou
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is it a part of a book?
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An autobiography describing the early years of the poet.
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what inspired the name of this text?
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When selecting a title, Angelou turned to Paul Laurence Dunbar, an African American poet whose works she had admired for years. Jazz vocalist and civil rights activist Abbey Lincoln suggested the title. According to Lyman B. Hagen, the title pulls Angelou's readers into the book while reminding them that it is possible to both lose control of one's life and to have one's freedom taken from them. Angelou has credited Dunbar, along with Shakespeare, with forming her "writing ambition". The title of the book comes from the third stanza of Dunbar's poem "Sympathy": I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,When he beats his bars and would be free;It is not a carol of joy or glee,But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core,But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings – I know why the caged bird sings.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Title
Maya is so devastated and traumatized, she chooses to not speak for five years. She gets her voice back when someone asks her to read one of her poems in public.
List of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings characters | Mr. Freeman
Angelou returned to the same poem she based the title of "Caged Bird" upon for the title of "A Song Flung Up to Heaven," from the third stanza of the Paul Laurence Dunbar poem "Sympathy". Along with Shakespeare, Angelou has credited Dunbar with forming her "writing ambition". The caged bird, a symbol for the chained slave, is an image Angelou uses throughout all her writings. I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,When he beats his bars and would be free;It is not a carol of joy or glee,But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core,But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings— I know why the caged bird sings.
A Song Flung Up to Heaven | Title
She also wanted to prevent it from happening to someone else, so that anyone who had been raped might gain understanding and not blame herself for it.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Rape
"Why do you weep?" inquired the young siskin of the old, "You're more comfortable in this cage than out in the cold." "You were born caged," said the elder, "this was your morrow; "I was free, now I'm caged—hence the cause of my sorrow."
Fables and Parables | Birds in a Cage
He has called the book a highly effective tool for providing real-life examples of these psychological concepts.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Influence
The valedictorian of Maya's eighth grade class. He makes up for Mr. Donleavy's discouragement by leading the audience in "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing", the "Negro national anthem".
List of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings characters | Henry Reed
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is a 1969 autobiography describing the early years of American writer and poet Maya Angelou. The first in a seven-volume series, it is a coming-of-age story that illustrates how strength of character and a love of literature can help overcome racism and trauma. The book begins when three-year-old Maya and her older brother are sent to Stamps, Arkansas, to live with their grandmother and ends when Maya becomes a mother at the age of 16. In the course of "Caged Bird", Maya transforms from a victim of racism with an inferiority complex into a self-possessed, dignified young woman capable of responding to prejudice.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Introduction
The song describes the sad life of a beautiful woman who has married for money instead of love. Its lyrics are as follows: The ballroom was filled with fashion's throng, It shone with a thousand lights, And there was a woman who passed along,
A Bird in a Gilded Cage | Synopsis
When he witnesses the murder of a black man by a group of white men, he is confused and unable to understand their hatred.
List of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings characters | Bailey Johnson Jr
Momma's neighbor, and the only black man Maya has seen whose trousers match his jackets. She and Bailey admire him because he does not go to church, which makes him "courageous".
List of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings characters | Mr. McElroy
Walker calls Momma's way a "strategy of subtle resistance" and McPherson calls it "the dignified course of silent endurance".
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Racism
A white man, he is the guest speaker at Maya's eighth grade graduation. He puts a pall over the ceremony and crushes the educational dreams of the audience by insinuating that black students are only capable of becoming athletes.
List of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings characters | Mr. Donleavy
A member of the Black church in Stamps. She is not always able to come to services, but when she does, she shouts as loud as possible to make up for her absences. Many humorous church-related anecdotes focus on her and her behavior. Also, one of the most comical chapters in the book.
List of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings characters | Sister Monroe
She goes from feeling shame about her race and appearance to feeling pride, in spite of experiences of racism and trauma. She is raped at the age of eight by her mother's boyfriend and responds by choosing not to speak for five years. She is brought out of her muteness by Mrs. Bertha Flowers, who introduces her to great literature.
List of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings characters | Marguerite Johnson ("Maya")
Three white rural girls who attempt to humiliate and intimidate Momma in front of her store when they taunt and expose themselves to her. Momma reacts by passively humming a spiritual, while Maya, watching from inside the store, weeps with shame and humiliation.
List of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings characters | "Powhitetrash" girls
Angelou's treatment of racism provides a thematic unity to the book. Literacy and the power of words help young Maya cope with her bewildering world; books become her refuge as she works through her trauma.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Introduction
Maya's teacher at George Washington High School in San Francisco. "A rare educator", she is white but shows no favoritism to her students based upon their race. Angelou states that she is "the only teacher I remembered", and probably the only white person who befriended her.
List of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings characters | Miss Kirwin
Later books in the series include "Gather Together in My Name" (1974), "Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas" (1976), "The Heart of a Woman" (1981), "All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes" (1986), "A Song Flung Up to Heaven" (2002), and "Mom & Me & Mom" (2013, at the age of 85). Critics have often judged Angelou's later autobiographies "in light of the first", and "Caged Bird" generally receives the highest praise.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Background
A "repulsive church official" who visits Stamps every 3 months. Maya and Bailey despise him because he is obese and never remembers their names, and because he eats the best chicken pieces at Sunday dinner. One Sunday, Sister Monroe is so inspired by his preaching that she hits him over the head with her purse; his teeth fall out and onto the floor near Maya, which results in Maya and Bailey's uncontrollable laughter and subsequent beating by Uncle Willie.
List of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings characters | Reverend Thomas
Many of the poems in "Shaker "focus on survival despite threatened freedom, lost love, and defeated dreams. Over half of them are love poems, and emphasize the inevitable loss of love. "Caged Bird", which refers to Angelou's first autobiography, is contained in this volume.
Shaker, Why Don't You Sing? | Introduction
A white dentist who refuses to treat Maya's tooth pain, in spite of his debt to Momma, incurred during the Great Depression. He states that he would rather put his "hand in a dog's mouth than in a nigger's". Momma reacts to this with passivity, while Maya is horrified and dreams up an elaborate fantasy about Momma threatening the racist dentist.
List of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings characters | Dentist Lincoln
Also in 1968, inspired at a dinner party she attended with Baldwin, cartoonist Jules Feiffer, and his wife Judy, and challenged by Random House editor Robert Loomis, she wrote her first autobiography, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings", published in 1969. This brought her international recognition and acclaim.
Maya Angelou | Africa to "Caged Bird": 1961–69
Stamps, Arkansas, as depicted in "Caged Bird", has very little "social ambiguity": it is a racist world divided between Black and white, male and female. Als characterizes the division as "good and evil", and notes how Angelou's witness of the evil in her society, which was directed at Black women, shaped Angelou's young life and informed her views into adulthood. Angelou uses the metaphor of a bird struggling to escape its cage, described in Paul Laurence Dunbar's poem, as a prominent symbol throughout her series of autobiographies. Like elements within a prison narrative, the caged bird represents Angelou's confinement resulting from racism and oppression.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Racism
However, Hagen notes that instead of beginning "Caged Bird" chronologically, with Maya and Bailey's arrival in Stamps, Angelou begins the book much later chronologically by recounting an embarrassing experience at church, an incident that demonstrates Maya's diminished sense of self, insecurity, and lack of status. Hagen explains that Angelou's purpose is to demonstrate Maya's journey from insecurity to her feelings of worth gained by becoming a mother at the end of the book.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Form
Maya internalizes the rejection she has experienced – her belief in her own ugliness was "absolute". McPherson believes that the concept of family, or what she calls "kinship concerns", in Angelou's books must be understood in the light of the children's displacement at the beginning of "Caged Bird". Being sent away from their parents was a psychological rejection, and resulted in a quest for love, acceptance, and self-worth for both Maya and Bailey.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Identity
Angelou uses the metaphor of a bird struggling to escape its cage described in the Paul Laurence Dunbar poem "Sympathy" throughout all of her autobiographies; she uses the metaphor in the titles of both "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" and her sixth autobiography "A Song Flung Up to Heaven". Like elements within a prison narrative, the "caged bird" represents Angelou's confinement resulting from racism and oppression. This metaphor also invokes the "supposed contradiction of the bird singing in the midst of its struggle". Reviewer Hilton Als observed that Angelou's witnessing of the evil in her society, as directed towards Black women, shaped Angelou's young life and informed her views into adulthood.
Themes in Maya Angelou's autobiographies | "Caged Bird" and "Gather Together"
As critic Susan Gilbert states, Angelou was reporting not one person's story, but the collective's. Scholar Selwyn R. Cudjoe agrees, and sees Angelou as representative of the convention in African-American autobiography as a public gesture that speaks for an entire group of people. Scholar Joanne M. Braxton sees "Caged Bird" as "the fully developed black female autobiographical form that began to emerge in the 1940s and 1950s". The book presents themes that are common in autobiography by Black American women: a celebration of Black motherhood; a criticism of racism; the importance of family; and the quest for independence, personal dignity, and self-definition.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Style and genre
Bailey Sr.'s pretentious girlfriend, who becomes jealous of Maya. After a violent argument, Maya runs away from her father's home and is homeless for a short while.
List of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings characters | Dolores
Maya's employer when she is ten years old. She insists upon calling her "Mary" or "Margaret". Maya is unable to tolerate this because "whites called black people too many other names", so Maya deliberately tries to get fired. She finally succeeds by breaking Mrs. Cullinan's prized china.
List of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings characters | Mrs. Viola Cullinan
The poem tells about the wonders of the South, like Cypresses and Mount Etna, but it also tells about homesickness and patriotism. The cage mentioned in the first verse refers to a cruel way of catching birds: The bird is trapped into a cage with its eyes pierced, and as a night singer it will attract other birds, who will fly straight to the catcher's net. Topelius opposed this harsh way of netting.
Sylvian Joululaulu | Introduction
"I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings", the 1969 autobiography about the early years of African-American writer and poet Maya Angelou, features many characters, including Angelou as a child, which she has called "the Maya character". The first in a six-volume series, "Caged Bird" is a coming-of-age story that illustrates how strength of character and a love of literature can help overcome racism and trauma. The book begins when three-year-old Maya and her older brother are sent to Stamps, Arkansas, to live with their grandmother and ends when Maya becomes a mother at the age of 16. In the course of "Caged Bird", Maya transforms from a victim of racism into a self-possessed, dignified young woman capable of responding to prejudice.
List of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings characters | Introduction
Angelou uses her autobiography to explore subjects such as identity, rape, racism, and literacy. She also writes in new ways about women's lives in a male-dominated society. Maya, the younger version of Angelou and the book's central character, has been called "a symbolic character for every black girl growing up in America". Angelou's description of being raped as an eight-year-old child overwhelms the book, although it is presented briefly in the text. Another metaphor, that of a bird struggling to escape its cage, is a central image throughout the work, which consists of "a sequence of lessons about resisting racist oppression".
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Introduction
Angelou states, early in "Caged Bird", that she, as the Maya character, "met and fell in love with William Shakespeare". Critic Mary Vermillion sees a connection between Maya's rape and Shakespeare's "The Rape of Lucrece", which Maya memorizes and recites when she regains her speech. Vermillion maintains that Maya finds comfort in the poem's identification with suffering. Maya finds novels and their characters complete and meaningful, so she uses them to make sense of her bewildering world. She is so involved in her fantasy world of books that she even uses them as a way to cope with her rape, writing in "Caged Bird", "...I was sure that any minute my mother or Bailey or the Green Hornet would bust in the door and save me".
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Literacy
Angelou also presents her eighth grade graduation differently in the film. In the book, Henry Reed delivers the valedictory speech and leads the Black audience in the Negro national anthem. In the movie, Maya conducts these activities.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Film version
The caged bird metaphor also invokes the "supposed contradiction of the bird singing in the midst of its struggle". Scholar Ernece B. Kelley calls "Caged Bird" a "gentle indictment of white American womanhood"; Hagen expands it further, stating that the book is "a dismaying story of white dominance". "Caged Bird" has been called "perhaps the most aesthetically satisfying autobiography written in the years immediately following the Civil Rights era". Critic Pierre A. Walker expresses a similar sentiment, and places it in the African-American literature tradition of political protest. Angelou demonstrates, through her involvement with the Black community of Stamps, as well as her presentation of vivid and realistic racist characters and "the vulgarity of white Southern attitudes toward African Americans", her developing understanding of the rules for surviving in a racist society.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Racism
"A Bird in a Gilded Cage" is a song composed by Arthur J. Lamb and Harry Von Tilzer. It was a sentimental ballad (or tear-jerker) that became one of the most popular songs of 1900, reportedly selling more than two million copies in sheet music. Jere Mahoney (Edison) and Steve Porter (Columbia) recorded two early popular versions of this song.
A Bird in a Gilded Cage | Introduction
Angelou recognizes that there are fictional aspects to her books – she tends to "diverge from the conventional notion of autobiography as truth". In a 1998 interview with journalist George Plimpton, Angelou discussed "the sometimes slippery notion of truth in nonfiction" and memoirs, stating, "Sometimes I make a diameter from a composite of three or four people, because the essence in only one person is not sufficiently strong to be written about."
List of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings characters | Introduction
He survives, fortunately, and returns to prison after being hospitalized and making a full recovery. Back at the prison, Marge finally visits Dwight, who gives her a flattened dandelion encased in a bar of soap he had carved for her with a message on the back intending to recruit her in helping him attempt another prison break. Marge does not agree to the escape attempt and Dwight, although saddened, says she can keep the token.
I Don't Wanna Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Plot
At first, Angelou intended to return to poetry and play-writing after completing "Caged Bird" and write no more autobiographies, but she chose the genre as her primary mode of expression because of its challenge and so that she could "change it, to make it bigger, richer, finer, and more inclusive in the twentieth century". In a 1989 interview, she stated, "I think I am the only serious writer who has chosen the autobiographical form to carry my work, my expression". As she told journalist George Plimpton during a 1990 interview, "Autobiography is awfully seductive; it’s wonderful". She also told Plimpton that like the tradition begun by Frederick Douglass in slave narratives, she used the literary technique of "speaking in the first-person singular talking about the first-person plural, always saying I meaning 'we'".
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Style and genre
When Angelou wrote "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" at the end of the 1960s, one of the necessary and accepted features of literature, according to critic Pierre A. Walker, was thematic unity. One of Angelou's goals was to create a book that satisfied this criterion, in order to achieve her political purposes, which were to demonstrate how to resist racism in America. The structure of the text, which resembles a series of short stories, is not chronological but rather thematic. Walker, in his 1993 article about "Caged Bird", "Racial Protest, Identity, Words, and Form", focuses on the book's structure, and describes how it supports her presentation of racism.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Form
As Lupton points out, all of Angelou's autobiographies, especially "Caged Bird" and its immediate sequel "Gather Together in My Name", are "very much concerned with what [Angelou] knew and how she learned it". Lupton compares Angelou's informal education with the education of other Black writers of the twentieth century, who did not earn official degrees and depended upon the "direct instruction of African American cultural forms". Angelou's quest for learning and literacy parallels "the central myth of black culture in America": that freedom and literacy are connected. Angelou is influenced by writers introduced to her by Mrs. Flowers during her self-imposed muteness, including Edgar Allan Poe and William Shakespeare.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Literacy
According to Von Tilzer, he was approached in 1899 by Lamb with the lyrics for a song. Although Von Tilzer liked it, he asked Lamb to change some of the words to make it clear that the woman in the song was married and not a mistress. Later that evening, as he worked out a melody at a piano in a public house with some friends, he noticed that many of the girls nearby were crying, which convinced him the song could be a hit. Later, Von Tilzer would claim that this song was "the key that opened the door of wealth and fame" for him.
A Bird in a Gilded Cage | Background
Freeman. He is found guilty during the trial, but escapes jail time and is murdered, presumably by Maya's uncles. Maya feels guilty and withdraws from everyone but her brother. Even after returning to Stamps, Maya remains reclusive and nearly mute until she meets Mrs. Bertha Flowers, "the aristocrat of Black Stamps," who encourages her through books and communication to regain her voice and soul. This coaxes Maya out of her shell. Later, Momma decides to send her grandchildren to their mother in San Francisco, California, to protect them from the dangers of racism in Stamps. Maya attends George Washington High School and studies dance and drama on a scholarship at the California Labor School.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Plot summary
"Birth" A deaf drumming hurts to hear To live to live trapped in the cage female bird I've already seen the infinite I was constellation Now I'm a wandering asteroid shooting star I divided myself in two Divided in order to not be subtracted I stayed whole if dented in each piece I cried because I was being born
Miriam Alves | Poem
"Caged Bird" appeared third on the American Library Association (ALA) list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–2000, sixth on the ALA's 2000–2009 list, and one of the ten books most frequently banned from high school and junior high school libraries and classrooms.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Censorship
A bird can't sing in a cage and also, a child can't be happy in school: his potential is restrained. Stanza five shows how people are dismayed at school and how students are stripped of their joy.
The School Boy | Poem transcription
Angelou was challenged by her friend author James Baldwin, and her editor, Robert Loomis, to write an autobiography that was also a piece of literature. Reviewers often categorize "Caged Bird" as autobiographical fiction because Angelou uses thematic development and other techniques common to fiction, but the prevailing critical view characterizes it as an autobiography, a genre she attempts to critique, change, and expand. The book covers topics common to autobiographies written by Black American women in the years following the Civil Rights Movement: a celebration of Black motherhood; a critique of racism; the importance of family; and the quest for independence, personal dignity, and self-definition.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Introduction
"I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" follows Marguerite's (called "My" or "Maya" by her brother) life from the age of three to seventeen and the struggles she faces – particularly with racism – in the Southern United States. Abandoned by their parents, Maya and her older brother Bailey are sent to live with their paternal grandmother (Momma) and disabled uncle (Uncle Willie) in Stamps, Arkansas. Maya and Bailey are haunted by their parents' abandonment throughout the book – they travel alone and are labeled like baggage. Many of the problems Maya encounters in her childhood stem from the overt racism of her white neighbors.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Plot summary
Vivian Baxter's boyfriend, he lives with Vivian and her family in St. Louis when Maya and Bailey are sent there to be with their mother. At first, he is a father substitute for Maya, who is hungry to be accepted by a male. He takes advantage of this by raping her, when she is eight years old, and then threatens to kill Bailey if she told anyone about it. Bailey encourages Maya to disclose what has happened, and Mr. Freeman goes to trial. He is sentenced to one year and one day, but is released, anyway. Four days later he is found murdered, probably by Maya's uncles.
List of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings characters | Mr. Freeman
Critic Lyman B. Hagan states that although the title is "less striking or oblique than titles of her preceding books," it is appropriate because Johnson's poem mentions a caged bird and provides a connection to Angelou's first autobiography, whose title was taken from a poem by Paul Lawrence Dunbar. The title suggests Angelou's painful loneliness and exposes a spiritual dilemma also present in her first volume. Johnson's use of the metaphor is different from Dunbar's because her bird is a female whose isolation is sexual rather than racial. The caged bird may also refer to Angelou after her failed marriage, but writer Mary Jane Lupton says that "the Maya Angelou of "The Heart of a Woman" is too strong and too self-determined to be kept in a cage".
The Heart of a Woman | Title
Two scenes in the movie differed from events described in the book. Angelou added a scene between Maya and Uncle Willie after the Joe Louis fight. In it, he expresses his feelings of redemption after Louis defeats a white opponent. Angelou also presents her eighth-grade graduation differently in the film. In the book, Henry Reed delivers the valedictory speech and leads the black audience in the Negro national anthem. In the movie, Maya conducts these activities.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (film) | Introduction
Maya and Bailey's "glamorous if feckless mother". Maya is in awe of her beauty:she is "too beautiful to have children". Vivian captivates both her children with her worldliness and euphoria, especially Bailey. Maya is emotionally separated from her mother. Angelou stated later in her life that she recognized that her mother had abandoned her and her brother, which meant that Vivian was "a terrible parent of young children". Vivian is concerned about providing for her children, but negligent towards them. When Maya becomes pregnant at the end of the book, Vivian accepts Maya and her child; it is the birth of her grandson that causes a connection between mother and daughter.
List of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings characters | Vivian Baxter Johnson ("Mother Dear")
Angelou introduces a unique point of view in American autobiography by revealing her life story through a narrator who is a Black female from the South, at some points a child, and other points a mother. Writer Hilton Als calls Angelou one of the "pioneers of self-exposure", willing to focus honestly on the more negative aspects of her personality and choices. For example, Angelou was worried about her readers' reactions to her disclosure in her second autobiography, "Gather Together in My Name", that she was a prostitute. She went through with it, anyway, after her husband Paul Du Feu advised her to be honest about it.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Style and genre
Angelou was unable to resist a challenge, and she began writing "Caged Bird." After "closeting herself" in London, it took her two years to write it. She shared the manuscript with her friend, writer Jessica Mitford, before submitting it for publication. Angelou subsequently wrote six additional autobiographies, covering a variety of her young adult experiences. They are distinct in style and narration, but unified in their themes and stretch from Arkansas to Africa, and back to the US, from the beginnings of World War II to King's assassination. Like "Caged Bird", the events in these books are episodic and crafted as a series of short stories, yet do not follow a strict chronology.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Background
A made-for-TV movie version of "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" was filmed in Mississippi and aired on April 28, 1979, on CBS. Angelou and Leonora Thuna wrote the screenplay; the movie was directed by Fielder Cook. Constance Good played young Maya. Also appearing were actors Esther Rolle, Roger E. Mosley, Diahann Carroll, Ruby Dee, and Madge Sinclair. Two scenes in the movie differed from events described in the book. Angelou added a scene between Maya and Uncle Willie after the Joe Louis fight; in it, he expresses his feelings of redemption and hope after Louis defeats a white opponent.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Film version
There are a number of minor characters in "Caged Bird", members of the Black and white community in Stamps that fill out Maya's world and inform her influences and early experiences. Among the most notable are:
List of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings characters | Minor characters
The Gilded Cage, derived from the phrase "a bird in a gilded cage" meaning living in a luxurious prison, may refer to:
The Gilded Cage | Introduction
Webster's "We think caged birds sing, when indeed they cry" is the novel's epigraph: the younger generation, apparently privileged but in reality trapped by the legacy of war and class, were singing captives. The novel ends with a note of liberation: Hal and Roden and Francis, like characters in Chekhov, will now have to do some real work; Stella must marry where she may; Caroline too will have to find work, though trained up to nothing by her upbringing.
E. B. C. Jones | "The Singing Captives" (1921)
Its success signalled the dominance of ballads in American popular music through 1914.
A Bird in a Gilded Cage | Background
Poet James Bertolino asserts that "Caged Bird" "is one of the essential books produced by our culture". He insists that "[w]e should all read it, especially our children". It was nominated for a National Book Award in 1970, has never been out of print, and has been published in many languages. It has been a Book of the Month Club selection and an Ebony Book Club selection. In 2011, "Time Magazine" placed the book in its list of 100 best and most influential books written in English since 1923. Critic Robert A. Gross called "Caged Bird" "a "tour de force" of language".
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Critical reception and sales
Lauret sees a connection between Angelou's autobiographies, which Lauret calls "fictions of subjectivity" and "feminist first-person narratives", and fictional first-person narratives (such as "The Women's Room" by Marilyn French and "The Golden Notebook" by Doris Lessing) written during the same period. As French and Lessing do in their novels, Angelou employs the narrator as protagonist and depends upon "the illusion of presence in their mode of signification". As a displaced girl, Maya's pain is worsened by an awareness of her displacement. She is "the forgotten child", and must come to terms with "the unimaginable reality" of being unloved and unwanted; she lives in a hostile world that defines beauty in terms of whiteness and that rejects her simply because she is a Black girl.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Identity
The main character, "an unlikely heroine", from whose perspective the story is told. She has been described as "a symbolic character for every black girl growing up in America". The book covers most of her childhood, from the age of three, when she and her older brother Bailey are sent to their grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas, until she was sixteen, when she gives birth to her son Clyde. Through the character of Maya, Angelou uses her own childhood to demonstrate how she was able to survive as a black child in a white-dominated world. Maya is resilient, highly intelligent and loves literature.
List of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings characters | Marguerite Johnson ("Maya")
African-American spirituality, as represented by Angelou's grandmother, has influenced all of Angelou's writings, in the activities of the church community she first experiences in Stamps, in the sermonizing, and in scripture. Hagen goes on to say that in addition to being influenced by rich literary form, Angelou has also been influenced by oral traditions. In "Caged Bird", Mrs. Flowers encourages her to listen carefully to "Mother Wit", which Hagen defines as the collective wisdom of the African-American community as expressed in folklore and humor.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Literacy
Moreover, she expressed that she wanted her music to echo the song of small birds.
Bird (singer) | History
According to Walker, the power of words is another theme that appears repeatedly in "Caged Bird". For example, Maya chooses to not speak after her rape because she is afraid of the destructive power of words. Mrs. Flowers, by introducing her to classic literature and poetry, teaches her about the positive power of language and empowers Maya to speak again. The importance of both the spoken and written word also appears repeatedly in "Caged Bird" and in all of Angelou's autobiographies. Referring to the importance of literacy and methods of effective writing, Angelou once advised Oprah Winfrey in a 1993 interview to "do as West Africans do ...
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Literacy
Maya and Bailey's uncle and Annie Henderson's son, he became disabled at the age of three when a babysitter dropped him. He walks with a cane. Early in "Caged Bird", Momma hides him in a bin of potatoes and onions to avoid being detected by the Ku Klux Klan. He helps Momma run her store and shows Maya kindness to the point that she wishes that he could be her father. He is just as strict as Momma, however, beating Maya and Bailey after they disrupt a church service and threatening to burn her on a potbelly stove for not learning her multiplication tables.
List of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings characters | Uncle Willie
When Maya and Bailey are sent to live with her mother when they are eight and nine, they stay with her family in St. Louis. Grandmother Baxter, Vivian's mother, is a neighborhood precinct leader of German/black descent who has connections with the local police. Tutti, Tom, and Ira are Vivian's brothers; they allegedly murder Mr. Freeman after he rapes Maya.
List of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings characters | Baxter Family
The book ends with Angelou at "the threshold of her literary career", writing the opening lines to her first autobiography, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings". As she had begun to do in "Caged Bird", and continued throughout her series, Angelou upheld the long tradition of African-American autobiography. At the same time she made a deliberate attempt to challenge the usual structure of the autobiography by critiquing, changing, and expanding the genre. Most reviewers agreed that the book was made up of a series of vignettes. By the time "Song" was written in 2002, sixteen years after her previous autobiography, Angelou had experienced great fame and recognition as an author and poet.
A Song Flung Up to Heaven | Introduction
Arensberg notes that Maya's rape is connected to the theme of death in "Caged Bird", as Mr. Freeman threatens to kill Maya's brother Bailey if she tells anyone about the rape. After Maya lies during Freeman's trial, stating that the rape was the first time he touched her inappropriately, Freeman is murdered (presumably by one of Maya's uncles) and Maya sees her words as a bringer of death. As a result, she resolves never to speak to anyone other than Bailey. Angelou connects the violation of her body and the devaluation of her words through the depiction of her self-imposed, five-year-long silence.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Rape
Before graduating, she becomes the first Black female cable car conductor in San Francisco. While still in high school, Maya visits her father in southern California one summer and has some experiences pivotal to her development. She drives a car for the first time when she must transport her intoxicated father home from an excursion to Mexico. She experiences homelessness for a short time after a fight with her father's girlfriend.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Plot summary
"I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" is the most highly acclaimed of Angelou's autobiographies. The other volumes in her series of seven autobiographies are judged and compared to "Caged Bird." It became a bestseller immediately after it was published. Angelou's friend and mentor, James Baldwin, maintained that her book "liberates the reader into life" and called it "a Biblical study of life in the midst of death". According to Angelou's biographers, "Readers, especially women, and in particular Black women, took the book to heart". By the end of 1969, critics had placed Angelou in the tradition of other Black autobiographers.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Critical reception and sales
The book is named ironically. Throughout he refers metaphorically to his caged pet bird. The bird has never sung one note in the cage its confined to, but on him releasing it, the bird returns to him and sings joyously. His friend, Little-Little, asks him the question - “Wouldn't you rather be free, just for a day, than spend a lifetime in a cage? It's beautifully illustrated by the artist Helen Cann, and it was this book that formed the source material for the Horse and Bamboo production. There are black-and-white autobiographical photos of the author in the Afterword.
Guo Yue (musician) | Writing
"Caged Bird" has been categorized as an autobiography, but Angelou utilizes fiction-writing techniques such as dialogue, thematic development, and characterization. She uses the first-person narrative voice customary with autobiographies, but also includes fiction-like elements, told from the perspective of a child that is "artfully recreated by an adult narrator". She uses two distinct voices, the adult writer and the child who is the focus of the book, whom Angelou calls "the Maya character". Angelou reports that maintaining the distinction between herself and "the Maya character" is "damned difficult", but "very necessary". Scholar Liliane Arensberg suggests that Angelou "retaliates for the tongue-tied child's helpless pain" by using her adult's irony and wit.
List of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings characters | Introduction
The song thrush is the only bird to be presented in the piece.
Verset pour la fête de la Dédicace | Structure
Angelou has stated that she wrote the book, in spite of potentially harming the reputation she gained after writing "Caged Bird", because she wanted to show how she was able to survive in a world where "every door is not only locked, but there are no doorknobs ... The children need to know you can stumble and fumble and fall, see where you are and get up, forgive yourself, and go on about the business of living your life".
Gather Together in My Name | Identity
Critic J. T. Keefe calls it "a wise and deeply felt poem". Neubauer considers Angelou's poem "Caged Bird", which she says "inevitably brings Angelou's audience full circle" with her first autobiography, as the most powerful poem in the volume. Keefe agrees, and calls it Angelou's "central motif" and a rhythmical and hypnotic chant that cries out to be sung". Neubauer states, "Her poems in "Shaker, Why Don't You Sing "imply that as long as such melodies are sung and heard, hope and strength will overcome defeated dreams". Scholar Yasmin Y. DeGout agrees, and cites "A Plagued Journey" as an example of Angelou's themes of liberation found in all her poetry.
Shaker, Why Don't You Sing? | Themes
The bird was a popular pet in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. Alfred, Lord Tennyson mentions "the linnet born within the cage" in Canto 27 of his 1849 poem "In Memoriam A.H.H.", the same section that contains the famous lines "'Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all." A "cock linnet" features in the classic British music hall song of that period My Old Man, and as a character in Oscar Wilde's children's story "The Devoted Friend"; Wilde also mentions how the call of the linnet awakens "The Selfish Giant" to the one tree where it is springtime in his garden.
Common linnet | Cultural references
The "aristocrat of Stamps" and the town's "black intellectual", Mrs. Flowers is a "self-supporting, independent, graceful" Black woman. She is the first person to treat Maya as an individual, and teaches her about the relationship between Blacks and the larger society, as well as "the beauty and power of language". She gently nurses Maya out of her mutism by reading to her and by loaning her books that inspire Maya to speak again.
List of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings characters | Mrs. Bertha Flowers
Lisa is named "Student of the Millennium", so Marge stresses that Homer has to attend her ceremony due to past absences at most of the kids' events. Homer then wakes up early and takes Maggie to the school auditorium. Meanwhile, Marge gets impatient waiting in line at the bank, so she strikes up a conversation with an apparently charming man named Dwight (Steve Buscemi). While talking, Dwight tells Marge to hold on. He then pulls out a gun and tells everyone to get down on the floor, just as another man walks into the bank and pulls out a rifle.
I Don't Wanna Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Plot
The Bird in a Cage, or The Beauties is a Caroline era comedy written by James Shirley, first published in 1633. The play is notable, even among Shirley's plays, for its lushness — what one critic has called "gay romanticism run mad."
The Bird in a Cage | Introduction
Although Momma is relatively wealthy because she owns the general store at the heart of Stamps' Black community, the white children of their town hassle Maya's family relentlessly. One of these "powhitetrash" girls, for example, reveals her pubic hair to Momma in a humiliating incident. Early in the book, Momma hides Uncle Willie in a vegetable bin to protect him from Ku Klux Klan raiders. Maya has to endure the insult of her name being changed to Mary by a racist employer. A white speaker at her eighth grade graduation ceremony disparages the Black audience by suggesting that they have limited job opportunities.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Plot summary
The guests began telling stories of their childhoods and Angelou's stories impressed Judy Feiffer. The next day she called Robert Loomis at Random House, who became Angelou's editor throughout her long writing career until he retired in 2011, and "told him that he ought to get this woman to write a book". At first, Angelou refused, since she thought of herself as a poet and playwright. According to Angelou, Baldwin had a "covert hand" in getting her to write the book, and advised Loomis to use "a little reverse psychology", and reported that Loomis tricked her into it by daring her: "It's just as well", he said, "because to write an autobiography as literature is just about impossible".
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Background
A Summer Bird-Cage is the 1963 debut novel by Margaret Drabble published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. The title of the novel is taken from a quotation from the play "The White Devil" by John Webster: ‘"Tis just like a summer bird-cage in a garden: the birds that are without despair to get in, and the birds within despair and are in a consumption for fear they shall never get out."
A Summer Bird-Cage | Introduction
Aside from dismissing it as a substandard work, John Lennon never discussed "And Your Bird Can Sing". His first wife Cynthia recalled that the song was inspired by her presenting Lennon with a clockwork bird inside a gilded cage, wrapped in gift paper, apart from the wind-up mechanism. She wound up the bird as she handed the present to Lennon so that it sang, leaving him with "an expression of sheer disbelief on his face" as he removed the wrapping paper. According to author Kenneth Womack, Lennon viewed the caged imitation bird as a metaphor for his marriage and a reflection of Cynthia's inability to understand him.
And Your Bird Can Sing | Background and inspiration
Furthermore, van Gogh's painting "Road with Cypress and Star" is referenced in the lyrics: "Those shadows of the blue road/Where are they?/I compare them with cypresses that I saw/Only in dreams" (Spanish: ""Aquellas sombras del camino azul"/"¿Dónde están?"/"Yo las comparo con cipreses que vi"/"Solo en sueños""). In one of his letters, van Gogh reflects on the suffering of a caged bird that has food and health, but still longs to be free like the other birds. This inspired Spinetta's lyrics: "Look at the bird, it dies in its cage" (Spanish: ""Mira el pájaro, se muere en su jaula"").
Artaud (album) | "Cantata de puentes amarillos"
"Shaker, Why Don't You Sing" is Maya Angelou's fourth volume of poetry. She studied and began writing poetry at a young age. After her rape at the age of eight, as recounted in her first autobiography "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" (1969), she dealt with her trauma by memorizing and reciting great works of literature, including poetry, which helped bring her out of her self-imposed muteness. The publication of "Shaker, Why Don't You Sing" occurred during one of the most productive periods of Angelou's career. She had written songs for Roberta Flack and had composed movie scores. She had written articles, short stories, TV scripts and documentaries, autobiographies, and poetry, she produced plays, and was named a visiting professor of several colleges and universities.
Shaker, Why Don't You Sing? | Background
For "Solo for Voice 91" Cage wrote his own text. He also used words of Indo-European roots (reflecting on Cage's specialist knowledge of mushrooms), a glossary of English and Foreign Geographical terms and names of constellations and Earth population centers.
Song Books (Cage) | General information
In 1923, the male gospel group Manhattan Harmony Four recorded the song as "Lift Every Voice and Sing (National Negro Anthem)". It was added to the National Recording Registry in 2016. The 1939 film "Keep Punching" features the song. In Maya Angelou's 1969 autobiography, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings", the song is sung by the audience and students at Maya's eighth-grade graduation, after a white school official dashes the educational aspirations of her class.
Lift Every Voice and Sing | Notable references and performances
Before writing "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" at the age of forty, Angelou had a long and varied career, holding jobs such as composer, singer, actor, civil rights worker, journalist, and educator. In the late 1950s, she joined the Harlem Writers Guild, where she met a number of important African-American authors, including her friend and mentor James Baldwin. After hearing civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. speak for the first time in 1960, she was inspired to join the Civil Rights Movement. She organized several benefits for him, and he named her Northern Coordinator of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Background
Dwight's partner in the robbery is based on John Cazale and his character in the movie "Dog Day Afternoon" which also involved a hostage situation. When Marge visited Dwight in prison Homer was among three Aryan Brotherhood members and called them the three amigos. The song "Who Can It Be Now?" by the Australian group Men at Work plays when Dwight stalks Marge.
I Don't Wanna Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Cultural references
A king lost his sight. An old woman said that the song of the bird, 'Grip', would restore it. The king's eldest son offered to fetch the bird, from where it was kept in a cage by another king; but on his way to fetch the bird, he stayed at a merry inn, where he enjoyed himself so much that he forgot about his journey. His two brothers followed; the second also stayed at the inn, but the youngest said that he had to fetch the bird 'Grip', and continued on instead of remaining at the inn. He stayed at a house in the woods where he heard shrieks in the night.
The Bird 'Grip' | Summary
Maya and Bailey's "no-account daddy". He is tall and handsome, with a "smile as slick as brilliantine". He attempts to portray importance, but speaks in a halting manner. He is insensitive towards his children. As Lupton states, "He represents the absent father, the man who is not there for his children, literally and figuratively". Bailey Sr. "has respect for neither morals nor money", but Maya is fascinated by his "ironic pretentiousness". He appears twice in "Caged Bird", when he shows up in Stamps to drive his children to St. Louis, and when Maya visits him for a summer in San Diego.
List of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings characters | Bailey Johnson Sr
The song is written in the key of F minor.
Bird Set Free | Composition
Gather Together in My Name (1974) is a memoir by American writer and poet Maya Angelou. It is the second book in Angelou's series of seven autobiographies. The book begins immediately following the events described in "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings", and follows Angelou, called Rita, from the ages of 17 to 19. Written three years after "Caged Bird", the book "depicts a single mother's slide down the social ladder into poverty and crime." The title of the book is taken from the Bible, but it also conveys how one black female lived in the white-dominated society of the U.S.
Gather Together in My Name | Introduction
As Angelou later stated, "I thought if I spoke, my mouth would just issue out something that would kill people, randomly, so it was better not to talk". African-American literature scholar Selwyn R. Cudjoe calls Angelou's depiction of the rape "a burden" of "Caged Bird": a demonstration of "the manner in which the Black female is violated in her tender years and ... the 'unnecessary insult' of Southern girlhood in her movement to adolescence". Vermillion goes further, maintaining that a Black woman who writes about her rape risks reinforcing negative stereotypes about her race and gender. When asked decades later how she was able to survive such trauma, Angelou explained it by stating, "I can't remember a time when I wasn't loved by somebody." When asked by the same interviewer why she wrote about the experience, she indicated that she wanted to demonstrate the complexities of rape.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Rape
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is an American television film based on the autobiography of the same name by Maya Angelou, first aired April 28, 1979 on CBS. Angelou and Leonora Thuna wrote the screenplay, and the movie was directed by Fielder Cook. Constance Good played the young Maya Angelou. Also appearing were Esther Rolle, Roger E. Mosley, Diahann Carroll, Ruby Dee, and Madge Sinclair. Filming took place in Vicksburg, Mississippi. The movie traces Maya's life from when she and her brother move in with their grandmother to the trauma of being raped as a young girl by one of her mother's boyfriends and the several years of silence that came after the attack.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (film) | Introduction
In its closing, the poem questions whether the bird's song has been real or part of a dream: "Was it a vision, or a waking dream? / Fled is that music:—do I wake or sleep?" (lines 79–80), and the theme of imagination once again arises as the poet appears, according to Timothy Hilton, unable to distinguish between his own artistic imagination and the song which he believes to have spurred it into action.
John Keats's 1819 odes | Ode to a Nightingale
The male bird sings a series of warbled notes to defend his nesting territory.
Sage thrasher | Vocalization
Song of the Birds or The Song of the Birds may refer to:
Song of the Birds | Introduction