NOTE: We have not included books by many award-winning authors of Indian-origin like Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Verses, Midnight’s Children), Jhumpa Lahiri (The Namesake), V. Maya Angelou is one of the famous female authors and civil rights activists born in 1928. And, confusingly, many of the British women detectives who have made it to American So in order to represent Plath’s enormous influence on the literary landscape of the decade-and of the decades since-I will choose Ariel, which includes most of Plath’s best and best-known poems, including “The Applicant” (always my personal favorite), “Lady Lazarus,” and “Daddy. Cr*pple is a slur, so if you're not actually one, don't use the word. Advertisement Escoffier: Le Guide Culinaire, by Auguste Escoffier. In 2011 she was awarded the Governor’s medal for excellence in Naga literature. Adams (born 1952, Anguilla, p/nf) 55 likes. William Shakespeare (1564-1616) Nationality: English. flag All Votes Add Books To This List ← Previous 1 2 … The list includes many familiar and great British female novelists such as J. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem.English women famous cookbook authors. The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. We’re especially fond of Angelou’s image of walking the ocean floor and never having to breathe. Can a country capable of such technological inventions not also heal itself of its social division?Ī poem about overcoming fear and not allowing it to master you, ‘Life Doesn’t Frighten Me’ is the perfect poem to conclude this pick of Maya Angelou’s best poems: a powerful declaration of self-belief and the importance of facing one’s fears.Īngelou lists a number of things, from barking dogs to grotesque fairy tales in the Mother Goose tradition, but comes back to her mantra: ‘Life doesn’t frighten me at all’. Playing on the name of her home country, Angelou invites us to reflect on the divisive nature of the ‘United’ States of America – a country in which racial and socio-economic divisions loom large.Īngelou refers to some of the great ‘achievements’ of America, from the Telstar satellite to the atomic bomb. The references to food being gone and rent being due suggest that life is a constant struggle for the Black Americans depicted in the poem, which takes its title from a prominent African-American district in New York. Here’s another poem in which racial inequality is tied to freedom, although poverty is another salient theme of the poem. The speaker is such a woman, who nevertheless finds something to call her ‘own’ when she looks to the sun, the rain, the oceans, and the mountains: nature’s bounty. This poem is perhaps the best example of this theme in Angelou’s poetry. Another important strand to her work is work itself: a focus on the daily menial tasks which many wives and mothers have to carry out around the home as part of their domestic duties. Many of Maya Angelou’s best-known poems focus on the plight of women, and specifically Black women. Yet Angelou tells us that the girl in the poem is ‘blameless’, inviting us to read the poem as about ‘mothers’ and ‘daughters’ in a wider sense: it is about the generational shift between African-American women of Angelou’s mother’s age, and those of Angelou’s own generation. The subject of the poem is a girl who goes home to her mother’s arms, afraid and ‘creeping’ because she fears she is in trouble. The poem concludes with the image of an insistent drumbeat which marks the rhythm of social change which the speaker and others involved in civil rights have established.
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