by Maya Angelou
Angelou's third poetry collection joins bodily confidence and resistance to poems of hurt, labor, family, and memory.
And Still I Rise is Maya Angelou's 1978 collection of thirty-two poems. It includes Still I Rise and Phenomenal Woman, alongside poems about love, violence, work, childhood, and aging. Three sections give the volume its shape. Its confident declarations share space with difficult relationships and remembered pain, so the whole book offers more than the celebratory voice of its best-known poems.
Phenomenal Woman makes bodily presence a source of confidence. The speaker names ordinary movements and features, then repeats her declaration of womanhood. The poem moves from other people's puzzled responses toward her own explanation of what makes her attractive.
California Prodigal uses a different vocabulary and setting. Old buildings and ancestral portraits surround an active present-day figure. Flowers and sunlight give the landscape movement while the painted ancestors remain fixed. The poem sets inherited surroundings against the life taking place within them.
Kin turns toward a brother and shared childhood. The speaker recalls walks, private conversation, and Arkansas evenings after describing separation and distress. Its address moves between family memory and uncertainty about the brother's experience. That uncertainty remains even when remembered laughter returns.
Part One, Touch Me, Life, Not Softly, contains eight poems, including A Kind of Love, Some Say, Phenomenal Woman, and Men. Part Two, Traveling, contains fifteen, including California Prodigal, Woman Work, and Kin.
Part Three, And Still I Rise, contains nine poems. It begins with Still I Rise and ends with Thank You, Lord. The individual poem's title omits the opening And used in the collection's title.
In Phenomenal Woman, the recurring declaration follows lists of gestures, features and movements. The speaker does not merely deny an unfavorable judgment; she supplies a different account of presence. The body's activity gives the answer substance, while the refrain makes others' uncertainty less decisive.
Repetition also determines the pace of the exchange. Observers may ask where attractiveness comes from, but the voice controls when and how the answer returns. The poem performs self-possession through its structure as well as naming it as a quality.
Kin begins with an expansive account of shared origin, then admits the speaker has tried to make other people replace her brother. That admission gives separation a consequence beyond loneliness. Affection can lead to claims on strangers who do not owe the relationship the speaker wants from them.
The return to childhood walks and private conversations does not make every uncertainty about the brother disappear. Repeated acknowledgment that he may be right keeps the address open. Shared memory supplies intimacy without giving the sister complete authority over his experience.
California Prodigal sets the stillness of inherited buildings and portraits beside the activity of a present figure and a flowering landscape. The contrast makes inheritance more complicated than reverence. A place can contain the past without requiring the living to reproduce its fixed attitudes.
Read beside Kin, the poem shows two different relations to what precedes a person: a shared memory that continues to move a speaker, and images whose stillness is disturbed by life around them. Neither relation is captured adequately by calling the collection simply a book of confidence.
The title's famous assertion belongs to a collection that also contains violence, labor, intimacy and aging. The table of contents moves through Touch Me, Life, Not Softly and Traveling before reaching the section called And Still I Rise. A reader encounters forms of exposure and movement as well as declarations of strength.
That variety matters when individual poems circulate separately. The assertive speaker of Phenomenal Woman and the uncertain sister in Kin do not need to be reconciled into a single unchanging attitude. The book permits assurance and vulnerability to occupy distinct acts of speaking.
The poem's bodily details, repeated declaration and address to observers.
The complete poem, including its admission about substitute brothers and its unresolved address.
The contrast between inherited portraits and activity in the present.
Contents record for the 1978 collection's three sections; later poems are not imported into this volume.
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.
I was your sister.
The full contents place confident declarations beside hurt, family memory, and work. Reading the collection broadens the view offered by a single frequently quoted poem.
A refrain, a short list, and an address to a brother produce different effects. The selected readings make those differences easy to compare.
In Kin, remembered walks and fireflies give childhood a place and a texture. California Prodigal similarly develops its argument through buildings, pictures, and plants.
An unnamed Black woman answers attempts to silence or diminish her.
A woman explains her appeal through movement, confidence, and the way she treats others.
The speaker answers attempts to humiliate or silence her with repeated assertions of survival. Comparisons with dust, air, and tides make that survival seem inevitable. The ending connects her voice to ancestors and the history of slavery.
A woman answers questions about her attractiveness by naming her body, movement, and self-possession. Each stanza returns to a declaration she makes for herself. The repeated answer refuses to let the observers' confusion define her.
An opening question compares physical blows, asking whether the victim's body can distinguish their source. The poem examines the confusion of violence with love. Its bruises and shock give a concrete basis to that distinction.
This brief poem lists clothes, music, a dance, a drink, and a prospective partner. Short rhyming phrases give the list a quick pace. Very little explanation separates the details of a social evening.
An old California property carries traces of its past in walls, vines, and portraits. Against that stillness, a living figure insists on activity and generosity. Flowers and sunlight complete the contrast between inherited images and present life.
Addressed to Bailey, the poem links a sister and brother through blood, separation, and remembered childhood. Private conversations and fireflies in Arkansas give the shared past specific forms. The speaker's affection does not resolve every uncertainty about her brother.
1978
Random House publishes And Still I Rise, Angelou's third collection of poetry.
1994
The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou gathers the poems with her other poetry collections.
2015
The Complete Poetry preserves And Still I Rise as a distinct collection within a larger volume, retaining its three sections.
Angelou's first autobiography gives a sustained account of childhood, family, and Arkansas, subjects that also appear in the poetry.
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The second memoir develops work, relationships, and early parenthood through narrative scenes rather than separate lyric voices.
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Hughes's earlier collection offers another approach to the rhythms of spoken language and Black musical traditions in poetry.
Read our takeAnd Still I Rise is the title of Angelou's 1978 poetry collection. Still I Rise, without the opening And, is a poem in its third section.
The original collection contains thirty-two poems: eight in Touch Me, Life, Not Softly, fifteen in Traveling, and nine in And Still I Rise.
Yes. Phenomenal Woman appears in the first section. Its repeated declaration of womanhood is distinct from the refrain in Still I Rise.
No. The poem Caged Bird belongs to Shaker, Why Don't You Sing?, a later poetry collection. It can appear alongside these poems in larger collected editions.
The poems include family memories, but a poetic speaker should not automatically be treated as a factual account of the author's life. The book contains different voices, situations, and forms.
The Random House hardcover with ISBN 9780394502526 identifies And Still I Rise itself. Larger collected editions include additional books and therefore have different contents and page counts.
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View authorThe sources below include the primary text, editions, scholarship, archival materials, and other records that informed this page. They document And Still I Rise, its publication, and its place in literary history.
The primary text represented by this page, used for descriptions of the work’s contents and for any quoted passages shown here.
ISBN and publication details; complete texts of Still I Rise, A Kind of Love, Some Say, and Country Lover.
Scanned publisher contents establish the thirty-two poems and three sections, preserved within the 2015 collected volume. The same contents place Caged Bird in Shaker, Why Don't You Sing?.
Authorized complete poem and its credit to the 1978 collection and 1994 collected edition.
Authorized complete poem for the landscape reading.
Authorized complete poem, dedication, and verified quotation.
Archival drafts and publication context for the collection.
Character close reading: Secondary discussion of the speaker's racial and gender identity and the unnamed addressee.
Character close reading: Secondary account of the shift in stanza pattern and the repeated declarations near the ending.
Character close reading: PBS American Masters: context for Angelou's work across dance, song, acting, and writing.
Character close reading: Secondary discussion of the speaker's challenge to conventional appearance and her act of self-definition.
Character close reading: Secondary discussion of attraction, expression, and the observers' inability to identify a single secret.
The primary text is the baseline reference for every book page. Additional references document publication history, interpretation, and historical context where that evidence is available.
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