Summary of Famous Works of Literature

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-Summary & Analysis of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings It written at the end of American Civil Rights movement, the poet (maya angelou)was inspired by the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a leader in the American civil rights movement. A Baptist minister, he became a civil rights activist early in his career. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee. He was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977 and Congressional Gold Medal in 2004. The structural elements of poems include the line, couplet, strophe and stanza. Poets combine the use of language and a specific structure to create imaginative and expressive work. The forms of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings poem is described as a lyric that write in combine Quintets and Quatrains stanzas. As lyric form categories, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is a short poem expressing personal thoughts and feelings. It is meditative for a single speaker speaks it about his feelings for a person, object, event or idea. Lines are arranged into groups known in poetry as stanzas. The types of rhyme that are used usually depend on the tone of the verse. In the rhyming I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings poem, each stanza follows the rhyming scheme of AAAB, as in the third and sixth stanza. The flexibility of the first two lines in the stanza following a rhyming scheme symbolizes the imprisonment of the bird. Each stanza follows the rhyming scheme of AAAB (thrill, hill, shrill, freedom). The rigidity of the first three lines in following a rhyming scheme signifies the captivity of the bird. However, the last phrase of each stanza breaks off from the rhyme with the last word being far from the original rhyme: “trill, still, hill, freedom. Metaphor is a figure of speech in which a word or phrase literally denoting one
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