I Too Sing America Angelou Analysis

Black oppression was around for over a hundred years. The idea of white supremacy was concocted in order for the white race to feed their ego. Key figures, including Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou, wrote about their experiences in the point of view of an oppressed African American struggling with racism. Langston Hughes’s poem “I, Too, Sing America” and Maya Angelou’s poem “Still I Rise” are a response to the hatred in the white man’s heart. Although these two poems share similar goals, they have elements that cause them to contrast. In “I, Too Sing America” and “Still I Rise,” the speakers are the authors, but the authors act as a voice for all African Americans who are exhausted with inequality and injustice. The audience of both poems is mainly directed
Hughes and Angelou utilize personal experience to grab at their audience and get them to realize their wrong ways because they are able to provide a personal ethos in their writing, therefore, their message is more powerful. If an outsider of discrimination were to write about the evils of racism, they would not be able to write from the heart because they have not experienced the isolation and alienation that comes with inferiority.
The literary devices used in both poems allow them to differentiate from one another. For example, Angelou’s “Still I Rise” has a more aggressive tone than Hughes’ “I, Too, Sing America” that is seen in the stanza: “You may shoot me with your words, You may cut me with your eyes, You may kill me with your hatefulness, But still, like air, I’ll rise”