What are some of the poetic techniques used in "Still I Rise" by Maya Angelou and important points about the poem?

"Still I Rise" by Maya Angelou is the title poem of a collection she published in 1978. It addresses the issues of racial and gender oppression, seeking to subvert them through a refusal to yield to the oppressor's attempts to define the subaltern.

The poem's first person narrator is an African-American woman who speaks directly to an audience addressed only as 'you". Although we are not informed as to whether this you is singular or...

"Still I Rise" by Maya Angelou is the title poem of a collection she published in 1978. It addresses the issues of racial and gender oppression, seeking to subvert them through a refusal to yield to the oppressor's attempts to define the subaltern.

The poem's first person narrator is an African-American woman who speaks directly to an audience addressed only as 'you". Although we are not informed as to whether this you is singular or collective or refers to the reader or all members of the privileged classes, races, and genders who oppress the narrator, the attitude of the narrator to the addressee is one of defiance. The poem begins with the assertion:

You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,

You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I’ll rise ...

In terms of poetic form, the first seven stanzas are quatrains with somewhat irregular rhythmic patterns, mainly rhymed ABCB. These quatrains recite the ways in which the narrator with act out her defiance of the white patriarchy by asserting her pride and her ownership of her own body. The final two stanza of the poem seem to reject the traditional quatrain form along with the culture that created it.

The most distinctive element of the poem is the repetition of the words "I rise", indicative of the way the narrator will not be held down by the forces of gender, economic, or ethnic oppression.