The Lesson

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1978

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Literary Context: Wisdom Literature

For many readers, contemporary poetry can seem intimidating. It can demand input and involvement as readers deal with layers of suggestion and irony, recreate objects into symbols, and, in turn, derive themes, necessarily plural and often contradictory. It encourages, really demands, discussion and probing analysis. Along the way, in that interactive process, the reader is expected to come to terms with the poem’s intricate formal architecture and the poet’s subtle manipulations of prosody itself.

That tradition in poetry, however, is barely three centuries old. In affirming that life is worth living, “The Lesson” offers, well, a lesson, singular. It teaches, consoles, and lifts the spirit. As such, it is an example of wisdom literature, a poetry genre nearly 3,000 years old in which poets use the vehicle of poetry to help guide readers to live better, fuller, richer lives.

Organized religions and established cultures have for centuries accumulated a body of such wisdom literature—parables, folk tales, fables, proverbs, fairy tales. In this genre, readers trust the writer to gift them not with themes but with inspirational lessons using accessible language, uncomplicated symbols, and approachable forms.

The most familiar practitioners, sacred and secular—Aesop, Buddha, Christ, Muhammad, Horace, La Fontaine, and more recently Flannery O’Connor and Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss)—conceive of writing and storytelling itself as an opportunity to teach and to encourage. If three centuries of poetry have encouraged discussion and creative interaction, three millennia of poetry have inspired, instructed, and comforted. In her poetry, Angelou tackled difficult issues—sexism, poverty, racism, violence, war—by offering inspirational wisdom about hope and faith, poetry that assures humanity it possesses the heart and the spirit to transcend these baser instincts, which is the foundational imperative of wisdom literature.

Critical Context: Establishment Backlash

Despite being nominated for numerous national literary awards and being awarded more than 50 honorary doctorates, despite being the only poet at the time, save the venerable Robert Frost, asked to recite an original poem at a presidential inauguration, and despite a prolific career that included more than 40 bestsellers, there hangs about the poetic legacy of Maya Angelou an uneasiness within the academic establishment over her place in the canon of American poetry.

Within academia, Angelou’s very celebrity, her popularity, made suspect the value of her poetry. Because her poetry was reader-friendly and because her poetic lines rejected Postmodern assumptions that poets reinvent poetic forms and, in turn, challenge the reader to engage often intimidating verse, Angelou has often been relegated to the margins of serious academic study, her verse dismissed as “beautiful nothingness” (Ramsey, Priscilla R. “Transcendence: The Poetry of Maya Angelou.” A Current Bibliography on African Affairs, 1984), overrated, mass-market humanism, feel-good greeting card poetry compelled by non-sequiturs, bumper-sticker cliches, and fluffy adjectives. Her poetry simply sounds regal, simply sounds important, encouraged by Angelou’s own mesmerizing dramatic readings, famously parodied in a series of Emmy-nominated Saturday Night Live sketches in Season 22 (1997). But, this argument contends, the poetry does not require, much less reward, re-reading. Angelou’s poetic line has been critiqued as careless and arbitrary in its design and more musical than poetic in its sound. That perception of Angelou as a second-tier poet was only encouraged when, in 2002, Angelou partnered with Hallmark on a line of what became quite lucrative greeting cards.

Angelou’s success, the critical backlash argues, came more from the poet’s own spellbinding imperial persona than the quality of her verse itself. “The Lesson,” for instance, offers only the noble advice to smile through the pain but without offering any specificity or context. Angelou’s defenders, however, point out how that inspirational messaging makes Angelou a poet more loved than analyzed, more appreciated than discussed, which, they argue, should assure her place in the canon of American poetry.