ears, even after she and her brother were sent back to Stamps to live with their grandmother. The girl immersed herself in books and in the power of language as it is spoken, written, and sung. She showed an early fondness for the Bible and for such black poets as Langston Hughes, Lawrence Dunbar, and James Weldon Johnson. She also developed a love for Shakespeare, Poe, Dickens, and Matthew Arnold. She graduated from the eighth grade in 1940, by which time she had started to speak again. She would later say that her self-imposed silence had given her the power to listen more intently and to remember every inflection and every nuance of what she heard (Current Biography 8).
Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was her first autobiographical book and was very well received in 1970 when it was published. She had earlier written a musical revue called "Cabaret for Freedom" with Godfrey Cambridge in 1960,
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