The United States Postal Service (USPS) unveiled a stamp last Tuesday to honor the late poet Maya Angelou. The presentation was attended by Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey.
Maya Angelou is depicted on this stamp with the quote ‘A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song’. Unfortunately this quote is not one of Angelou’s.
This quote seemed to be from Angelou’s most well know work ‘I know why the caged bird sings’. Soon after the presentation, people realised that these lines came from the book ‘A cup of sun’ by poet Joan Walsh Anglund.
The Washington Post discovered that this quote had been attributed to Angelou before. Even President Obama used this quote when he gave the poet an important award.
As Abraham Lincoln always said, “The trouble with quotes on the Internet is that you never know if they’re accurate.”
