Poet
Maya Angelou
American poet · 1928–2014
Maya Angelou's life reads like a dozen lives: streetcar conductor, dancer, journalist in Ghana, friend and colleague of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. After a childhood trauma she stopped speaking for nearly five years — and in that silence, she later said, she memorized poetry and learned to listen.
Her memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) took its title from Paul Laurence Dunbar's "Sympathy" and made her famous; her poems made her beloved. In 1993 she read "On the Pulse of Morning" at Bill Clinton's inauguration — the first inaugural poet since Robert Frost — and in 2010 received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Her work remains under copyright, so we present her signature poems with brief excerpts and links to authorized sources.
Maya Angelou's most famous poems
These poems are still in copyright, so we can't reprint them — but here's what makes each one matter, and where to read it.
Still I Rise1978
You may trod me in the very dirtBut still, like dust, I'll rise.
The title poem of And Still I Rise is a defiance anthem built on a swaggering, almost taunting rhythm — each stanza absorbs an insult and converts it into buoyancy. The imagery moves from dust to air to ocean tides, things that cannot be held down by their nature. It is now recited everywhere from classrooms to memorials, including Angelou's own.
Read the full poem →Phenomenal Woman1978
Phenomenal woman,That's me.
A celebration of presence over prettiness: the speaker catalogs the unglamorous, unmistakable sources of her magnetism — the stride, the bend of the back, the smile — and refuses every standard she didn't set herself. The refrain lands like a mic drop in every stanza. It has become a touchstone poem for generations of women.
Read the full poem →Caged Bird1983
The caged bird singswith a fearful trill
Angelou returns to the Dunbar image that titled her memoir, alternating between a free bird that 'dares to claim the sky' and a caged one whose clipped wings leave it only a voice. The song of the caged bird — heard on the distant hill — is both lament and irrepressible hope. It is her clearest parable of freedom denied and demanded.
Read the full poem →On the Pulse of Morning1993
A Rock, A River, A Tree
Written for Bill Clinton's first inauguration, the poem gives the ancient landscape itself — rock, river, tree — a speaking voice that addresses every American lineage by name. Angelou's televised reading reached millions and sent the published version up the bestseller lists, a rare feat for a poem. It frames a new presidency as simply a new morning, offered to everyone.
Read the full poem →Alone1975
Nobody, but nobodyCan make it out here alone.
A blues-cadenced meditation arguing that no amount of money or self-sufficiency exempts anyone from needing other people — even millionaires with 'money to burn' are lonely at the end. The repeated refrain works like a congregation's response, making the poem itself an act of company. It is one of her most quoted poems about community.
Read the full poem →When Great Trees Fall
When great trees fall,rocks on distant hills shudder,
Angelou's great elegy describes how the death of a towering soul disturbs the whole landscape of the living — then traces the slow return of peace: 'They existed. They existed.' It is read constantly at funerals and memorials, and was widely shared upon Angelou's own death in 2014. Few modern poems offer grieving readers a clearer arc from shock to gratitude.
Read the full poem →