How does the style of the book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings relate to Angelou’s role as a poet?

Maya Angelou's understanding of herself as a lyric and dramatic poet powerfully informs the style of her autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Even the choice of title (borrowed from African-American poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar's poem "Sympathy") announces insight into the particular perspective of the lyric poet. The caged bird is the poet, and the poet sings not out of joy but out of a need to plead with God.
Stylistically, Angelou's conception of her role as a poet shapes the use of imagery, voice, sentence structure, diction, and characterization in the novel. For example, the novel depicts various emotions in startlingly vivid and imagistic terms more readily associated with lyric poetry than with autobiographical non-fiction. Thus, the minister's wife has "a long yellow face full of sorry" and young Maya worries that "my poor head would burst like a dropped watermelon." Neither of these images are meant in a literal or realistic sense; they are written with a considerable amount of poetic license, as befits a text that is ultimately about the conditions under which self-expressive speech is possible.