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She called herself a poet. The world insisted she was something else.

Before Maya Angelou became famous as a memoirist, she was already writing poetry, a habit that began in childhood in Arkansas, where reciting great literature helped her recover her voice after years of self-imposed silence following a sexual assault. As a young woman she sang and danced professionally, touring with Porgy and Bess and performing calypso in nightclubs under the stage name she later kept, and many of the song lyrics she wrote in that period resurfaced years later in her poetry collections. She eventually set performing aside for writing, prompted by an editor who dared her to try an autobiography, which became I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and made her internationally known even though she always thought of herself first as a poet. For years she alternated publishing a volume of poems with a volume of memoir, working by a fixed ritual of early mornings in a bare hotel room with only a legal pad, a thesaurus, a Bible and a deck of cards for company. Her poetry reached its widest audience when she read "On the Pulse of Morning" at Bill Clinton's inauguration, and later poems marked occasions like the United Nations anniversary, the Million Man March, and the deaths of Michael Jackson and Nelson Mandela.

Her poems return again and again to love, loss, music, racism and the struggle to survive it, often coded in language and imagery meant to resonate especially with Black readers even as the feelings apply to everyone. Critics repeatedly link her work to the blues, noting how she uses humor and ridicule rather than tears to absorb pain, and how closely her rhythms and repetitions mimic song and speech. Many poems, especially in her early collections, deal with the humiliations and small triumphs of ordinary Black life, giving dignity to figures like a shoeshiner or children playing hopscotch, while others, like her best-known

Before the writing career, she toured Europe in Porgy and Bess and sang calypso in 1950s nightclubs — and songs she wrote back then later resurfaced in her poetry collections.

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