Through many years of writing, Maya Angelou writing style has remained constant. In her poem “Still I Rise” Maya Angelou conveys her passionate and powerful style with natural and inspiring words. Maya Angelou demonstrates his style through the usage of literary devices, parallelism, tone, vocabulary, and symbolism.

     In her poem Maya Angelou demonstrate her writing style with literary devices such as smiles, personification, rhetoric questions, repetition, anaphora and hyperbole. The poet showed her style by giving examples of similes “shoulders fall falling down like teardrops”, and “because I walk like I have got oil wells, pumping in my living room.” In the poem the poet Maya Angelou, gave examples of personification like “you may write me down in history with your bitter twisted lies” and “weakened by my soulful cries.”

     The poem has a variety of rhetoric questions such as “did you want to see me broke?” and “does my haughtiness offend you?” The poem has an example of repetition such as “just like moons and like suns.” In the poem the poet gives an example of an anaphora “you may shoot me with your words; you may cut me with your eyes.” In addition to all of these literary devices the poet makes usage of a hyperbole when she states “because I walk like I got oil wells, pumping in my living room.”

     In Maya Angelou poem just like this one “Still I raise” the poet makes usage of parallelism. In the poem there is a parallelism within the stanzas. In the first lines a problem is presented but in the last line the poet presents the action that she is going to take for example the poet stated “ you may write me down in history” but then she concluded “ but still, like dust, I will rise.” The form of this stanzas shows a type of cause and effect parallels within all of the stanzas, and at the end of the poem the poet reaffirms three times that she will rise “I rise, I rise, and I rise.”

     The tone of Maya Angelou in her poem “Still I rise” is very strong, powerful and inspiring.  The tone that she used gives strength, support, and inspiration to all women that don’t believe in themselves. The tone in this poem is of a woman that has all the passion in her and believes that she is going to make in life. In not one of those lines, does she not believe that she is not going to be able to make it and survive against everything that is thrown at her. In addition Maya Angelou tone was defensive, as she was defending her position and what she believed in as a woman.

     In her poem Maya Angelou conveyed her home style through the usage of her vocabulary. The poet used a very simple and natural home like style vocabulary that can be understood by everyone. Maya Angelou style is simple but her words are strong and impacting. The way the poet puts the words together makes the reader understand the message she wants to convey, for example here the word “lies” is a very simple word but the importance of it, is much stronger. The poet Maya Angelou is fighting against those twisted lies, and bitter times.

     Maya Angelou conveys her magical style through the usage of symbolism. Specially, in this poem “Still I Rise” Maya Angelou conveys infinite examples of symbolism. One example of symbolism that Maya Angelou uses in this poem is “out of the huts of history’s shame.” The history shames is the fact that back when she was young Maya Angelou didn’t want to be a black girl because of her hair, because she was mistreated, and because she was not accepted by society.  The adolescent years of Maya Angelou were history of sadness and mistreatment from everyone that surrounded her.