Author’s program note. To understand the point of this article, the point of Maya Angelou’s complaint about Best Paraphrasing Tool Online the great words of one of history’s most influential speakers on his very monument, you must love both language and precision. And above all you must love the truth.
Angelou is an honest woman. She is a truth-telling woman. And is a woman who understands and can wield with effect the right words in the right order. Most people will call her a writer, and a writer she is. But I prefer to call her a poet, for she is that, too.
A poet is a person who strives to deliver maximum impact with minimum words. Who labors with the demons of truth, the difficulties of language. And who works obsessively (for every poet is obsessive) with delivering just the right meaning… and this is difficult.
To such a person, gifted with the scourge of outrage. The loutish behavior of the officials in charge of the new national memorial to the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. is deeply painful… and thoroughly outrageous. Not least because in true loutish fashion, they did not have a clue that their seemingly innocent action would produce justifiable rage.
But before we dig into that, I want you to hear Maya Angelou, poet, read from her acclaimed works. For few poets have won so much recognition as she. Listening to the woman as she reads her words will make it clear why. Go to any search engine. Listen to the cadence, feel the way she caresses the language, loving each word tenderly before she delivers it to an expectant world. She is in love with language and the mighty power of language… and she is at war with the unenlightened who by killing language, obliterate meaning and leave us the poorer.