Right. Blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter.
Free verse is generally unrhymed and without a set meter, though rhymes and meters can still be found lurking around in many free verse poems.
Poetry also does not require line breaks (someone mentioned this above). The line between prose and poems is extremely fluid and dynamic.
One of my favorite poems I found scratched into the wall of a men’s room. It read thus:
Roses are red
Violets are blue,
Some poems rhyme
and some poems don’t.
Trite, cloying doggerel.
It sounds like she went to say “reluctance”, and missed.
Rather reminds me of this thread, unfortunately.
Regards,
Shodan
I’ve only read a few of her poems, and less than a hundred pages of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Color me unimpressed. Her affected English accent also annoys me.
According to Merriam-Webster, truculence = belligerence = assertiveness, hostility, or combativeness
The walls of ignorance and prejudice and cruelty, which she railed against valiantly all her public life, have not fallen, but their [belligerence] to do so does not speak against her determination to make them collapse.
The walls of ignorance, prejudice, and cruelty were fighting against attempts to make them fall. Makes sense to me.
I may belong to the only Department of English represented on this messageboard to have invited Ms. Angelou to read her verse to our students. Needless to say, it was an excruciating embarrassment to the published poets on the faculty, a mark of shame to most of the other members of the English Department, a mild blot on the rest of the faculty of arts and sciences, and utterly unnoted by the other faculty, staff and students, who all assumed that because she had read at Clinton’s inauguration, she was a real poet and the stuff she was reading was poetry.
She had been invited by our new university president, who wouldnt recognize a poem if it chewed on her buttocks and who didn’t think to ask the poets what we felt about her choice. Paid a pretty penny to get her, too, as I recall–could have gotten three or four real poets for that money.
I myself got into hot water because I refused to cancel my class so my students could attend her reading. I didn’t have tenure at the time, and took some heat for my refusal. Some of my students were made to skip my class because they had been assigned to the attend the reading,
Problem is, the phrase “to do so” means “to fall”, so the second half of the sentence makes no sense.
If truculence means hostility, then “truculence to do so” means “hostility to do so.”
You pretty much took the words out of my mouth. There is something about the rhymes and meter that are conducive for what one might call “inspirational” readings, and they have a forcefulness in a good delivery that falls flat in print. Not great, I suppose, but quite effective in the right context (though I think the context is more “event” oriented and not just a more informal/casual setting, which probably speaks to the inherent limitations of her work).
Yes, but that still doesn’t scan. “Their hostility to fall?” You can see what she was trying to say, but what she actually said is incoherent.
An -ing on fall would help.
I hate when people choose words that they don’t seem to know how to use. It’s worse from a poet. It makes me… truculent.
Except nobody (other than Ms. Angelou) ever uses it that way. Mostly you see the adjective “truculent”; when “truculence” is used, it’s more in the form of “his truculence kept others at a distance”; in any case, if someone said “his belligerence to do so” or “his hostility to do so”, you’d think, at best, they spoke English as a second language.
Well, to be honest, I know a lot of poets, and some of them speak poet-ese as their first language. 
Well, the response in this thread has been overwhelmingly negative. So why is this woman so famous? And it’s not just that she’s popular with audiences; according to her Wikipedia entry, she has
What gives? Why is she so honored if she’s apparently not that good? (I’m trusting the mass wisdom of Dopers here – y’all have never led me wrong before…)
And while people are analyzing her writing, I have to submit this bit from her bio at her website. It’s at the very least awkwardly phrased, IMHO.
It’s not exactly unusual for really bad poets to be famous. See: McKuen, Rod. Bukowski, Charles. Kilmer, Joyce. Stepanek, Mattie.
Bukowski isnt’ near McKuen’s or Kilmer’s awfulness. Probably a better novelist than a poet, but a decent wrter, with an original voice and outlook.
I never heard of Stepanek.
I just saw Maya Angelou on a commercial for Target. Hey, gravitas can also be gotten at a discount!
There’s two kinds of poets. There are poets who write and ethrall with the exigency of their word choices, and poets who do the same performing their poems. Of the latter group, whatever deficiencies exist in the technical aspects of the writing of the poem is often disguised by how well the poet reads it.
Ms. Angelou is very solidly in the second camp of poet.
More to the point: she writes the kind of poems any inspired and talented performer can perform better than she.
What? You don’t sway and stir when you walk?
I do, unless of course I’m being truculent. Then I stomp and storm ignitingly.