Analyzing How Stylistic Devices Construct Resistance in Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die” and Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise”

Resistance poetry turns experiences of racial oppression into artistic and political agency, yet much existing scholarship privilege's themes over the linguistic means through which resistance is built. This study analyzed how stylistic devices construct the theme of resistance in Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die” (1919) and Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise” (1978). Guided by postcolonial theory and stylistics, a qualitative comparative textual analysis was conducted. The two poems were purposively selected as primary texts, while scholarly books and articles served as secondary sources. Close reading, thematic coding, and stylistic analysis of imagery, diction, pronouns, repetition, tone, symbolism, rhythm, and form were applied to both poems. The results show that McKay builds collective and confrontational resistance through a rejected animal image, martial imagery, plural pronouns, a repeated conditional opening, a militant tone, and a tightly controlled sonnet form (iambic pentameter, abab cdcd efef gg) with alliteration and enjambment that converts the threat of death into honourable defiance. Angelou, in contrast, constructs individual and psychological resistance through the refrain “I rise” and its shift from “I’ll rise” to “I rise,” an addressed “you,” natural and prosperity imagery, rhetorical questions, a confident tone, and ballad-like quatrains whose musical rhythm turns historical humiliation into self-affirmation. Both poets reject dehumanization, reclaim dignity, and use repetition and imagery as ideological tools, although McKay stresses communal action while Angelou stresses personal empowerment. The findings confirm that resistance in poetry is made through language as well as theme, and that style and context must be read together. The study examined texts rather than classrooms or learners, it offers tentative pedagogical suggestions tied to its textual findings and recommends classroom-based research to test them.