Four Skinny Trees Maya Angelou Analysis

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” utilize realistic details to suggest hidden meanings within their stories. Moreover, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “Yellow Wallpaper” and Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” employ realistic details to convey social critiques. Thus, realistic details illuminate the true nature of stories and offer social critiques.

The authors want their audiences to use these tales and examples as life lessons and hope for them to utilize these sources in their future lives. These two ideas are presented through the use of figurative language, mainly metaphors. In addition, the similar tone of these pieces allows the author to connect more deeply with the readers. Toni Morrison’s Nobel lecture, folktales, and several poems illustrate how metaphors and tone are used to describe experience and caution the readers.

The German philosopher Nietzsche once said, “That which does not kill us, make us stronger”, and in many instances this is exactly the case. In most every instance of tragedy or hardship, the people affected must either yield to or rise above their situation, and in rising above, develop or display extraordinary and exemplary traits uniquely fitted to dealing with that situation. As a result, without adversity, these talents would be left unused. There are instances in which people crack under the pressure or sink to the expectations of their situation, but, depending on the character of the person involved, they may take the situation and use it to better themselves. It is a unique opportunity to utilize or develop traits that often remain

Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Annie Johnson on April 4th, 1928 in St. Louis, Missouri. In 1931, after her parents’ divorce, Angelou and her older brother, Bailey, moved to Stamps Arkansas to live with their paternal grandmother, Mrs. Annie Henderson, and her crippled uncle, Willie. Their family resided in the living quarters attached to the back of the small store that they owned. As a young African American girl, Angelou experienced harsh racism and discrimination while in Stamps (Angelou, Maya).

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you” Angelou expressed. Maya Angelou was a famous American poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist.Throughout her lifetime Maya starred in movies, wrote many poems, autobiographies, and essay books. She never wanted to hold anything back, whatever was on her mind she always wanted to write it down or announce it out loud. She loved the feeling of being able to express herself. With the mindset Maya had she was always qualified to come up with things to write about.

Viewing “Perhaps the World Ends Here” from a psychological perspective gave me insight in to why Harjo would deliver a poem with such an inspiring moral. Harjo’s life defines the word “effort” and “Perhaps the World Ends Here” is a summarization of her life. Knowing how she achieved her many accomplishments regardless of the mental pressure she must have received due to her social status allows me to have deeper recognition for Harjo and her work. Her work emphasizes

Rationale: For this task, I created a diary because I think that this style of writing would be an extremely effective way to show another major character’s emotions and ideas, as it can be written from a first person perspective, giving a huge amount of insight. I based my task on a short story by Edgar Allen Poe, titled “The Tell-Tale Heart.” I chose this piece as it gives the opportunity to be very creative in my writing, but also introduces various constraints, such as writing in a similar style to Poe, and trying to avoid any plot holes. This task specifically relates to part 4 of the language and literature course, being; literature, as the stimulus text is a piece of literature, as is my piece of writing.

In Metaphors, I found the literary devices stanza, point of view, imagery and metaphor. There is one stanza to this piece with each line being equal in length and there being nine lines. The point of view is told from the author of the piece, but is interesting because the metaphors used in this piece are specific to the author. An example of a metaphor is “An elephant, a ponderous house.”

In a letter to his brother, the great painter, Vincent Van Gogh, once wrote,“Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it”. In this quote, Van Gogh summarizes a subject great writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson has devoted entire essays to defining and explaining, and that is the subject of poetry. As it can be seen, a poet undertakes that almost impossible job of transposing what he or she sees in Nature on to paper for others to read. Only a true poet can be successful in an attempt. It is not just Nature a poet tries to capture into words, but also social experiences and human truths.

“What is going on in these pictures in my mind?” (Didion 2). Joan Didion’s “Why I Write” provides an explanation to her perspective om writing and why she writes. Later on, she states that she writes as a way to discover the meaning behind what she is seeing. During this past semester as we wrote about dance, a heavy focus was on description and interpretation rather than contextualization and evaluation.

Author’s lives inspire their writing in many ways. An illustrious writer, Edgar Allan Poe, experienced continuous sufferings throughout his life. The heartaches he faced transferred into his writing. Poe’s works are dark and traumatic, such as “The Pit and the Pendulum.” He uses the unthinkable and shapes short stories out of them.

Context/Purpose/Audience Still I Rise, written in 1978 by African American poet and civil-rights activist Maya Angelou, is a resoundingly courageous and unearthing poem with an inspiring invited reading directly related to the time period it was written in: during the declaration for Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). The poem discusses an African American woman’s struggles against racism and hatred from the society. It consists of nine-stanzas, offering words of inspiration to those who have been oppressed. It sends a message of hope that even in the midst of adversity it is possible to overcome obstacles and find the inner strength and confidence to rise above them. This poem is very straightforward making the message more meaningful and affective.

No one would 've ever thought that s/he were similar to a person that lives across the Pacific or atlantic, or even a person across the globe. Actually, s/he might be similar to the person across the globe. Seedfolks by Paul Fleischman and “Human Family” by Maya Angelou both share a common them, even though they talk about two tremendously different topics. This theme is that even with high-scale differences, people can nevertheless recognize similarities with others. Maya Angelou shows the theme by showing that everyone has a diverse lifestyle, but the lifestyle is made up of common things. On the other hand, Paul Fleischman portrays the theme by showing how so diverse people united to form similarities, through a common goal or common passion.

From “Living Like Weasels”, by Annie Dillard, To “The Sky Tree” by the Huron Tradition, these separate texts and the times they have been told have a lot of things in common. They represent each other on how these two really different text styles the perform in. The first text is “Living Like Weasels”, by Annie Dillard. One day she was sitting by a pond and enjoying nature.

‘Still I Rise’ by the American, Maya Angelou presents the character of a black woman who is oppressed in the 1970s but refuses to accept this. ‘Disabled’ by Wilfred Owen, however, is concerned with a character who is ‘broken’ after the disabilities he suffers in the First World War at the beginning of the twentieth century.