In the two-stanza poem “I’m Nobody! Who are you?”, using a childish and playful manner to in a sense defend her isolated life, Emily Dickinson mocks the dreary Somebodies (5) who are incapable of comprehending that anonymity and the avoidance of the public eye are preferable to fame or recognition. As a poet who remained unrecognized during her lifetime, we can see how in this poem Dickinson shows that she is indeed excited to be a “Nobody” and makes use of an exclamation mark (1) to assure this fact. Yet, as excited as she can be for being Nobody, in the second part of the opening line, we realize the speaker is meeting someone else, and in the line that follows, it is revealed to us that she is hoping the person she meets is a nobody too. Though we know she is thrilled and eager to have found someone who is a nobody like her, we also know she wants to keep this a secret. She tells the person she meets to not tell about them being nobodies, despite how excited she was for meeting someone else to whom she could relate to because of her fear of becoming somebody. She believes if someone other than the two of them found out, “they’d advertise” (4), and as already mentioned at the beginning of the poem, the author enjoys having no recognition and being unknown. …show more content…
Helping herself with a simile, she describes public persons as being like frogs, implying that the bleak somebodies announce and publicize their names just like frogs that croak in a swamp. After making the comparison between frogs and people who live a public life, Emily mentions the frogs’ “admiring Bog” (8) or audience, whose members are the only ones listening to their croaking. Therefore trying to convey that even though you’re living out in the open and have an audience, you’re only advertising yourself to the bog instead of to a much bigger
Approaching Emily Dickinson’s poetry as one large body of work can be an intimidating and overwhelming task. There are obvious themes and images that recur throughout, but with such variation that seeking out any sense of intention or order can feel impossible. When the poems are viewed in the groupings Dickinson gave many of them, however, possible structures are easier to find. In Fascicle 17, for instance, Dickinson embarks upon a journey toward confidence in her own little world. She begins the fascicle writing about her fear of the natural universe, but invokes the unknowable and religious as a means of overcoming that fear throughout her life and ends with a contextualization of herself within both nature and eternity.
The dash in Emily Dickinson’s poetry, initially edited away as a sign of incompletion, has since come to be seen as crucial to the impact of her poems. Critics have examined the dash from a myriad of angles, viewing it as a rhetorical notation for oral performance, a technique for recreating the rhythm of a telegraph, or a subtraction sign in an underlying mathematical system.1 However, attempting to define Dickinson’s intentions with the dash is clearly speculative given her varied dash-usage; in fact, one scholar illustrated the fallibility of one dash-interpretation by applying it to one of Dickinson’s handwritten cake recipes (Franklin 120). Instead, I begin with the assumption that “text” as an entity involving both the reading and writing of the material implies a reader’s attempt to recreate the act of writing as well as the writer’s attempt to guide the act of reading. I will focus on the former, given the difficulties surrounding the notion of authorial intention a.k.a. the Death of the Author. Using three familiar Dickinson poems—“The Brain—is wider than the Sky,” “The Soul selects her own Society,” and “This was a Poet—It is that,”—I contend that readers can penetrate the double mystery of Emily Dickinson’s reclusive life and lyrically dense poetry by enjoying a sense of intimacy not dependent upon the content of her poems. The source of this intimacy lies in her remarkable punctuation. Dickinson’s unconventionally-positioned dashes form disjunctures and connections in the reader’s understanding that create the impression of following Dickinson through the creative process towards intimacy with the poet herself.
... I am no one.” In both instances, the clause “when I am” is repeated, indicating that as the poem nears its end, the poet is finally inclined to mention himself. What is interesting to note is that throughout the rest of the poem, he speaks endlessly about his lover. Yet the words that he spares for himself provide a negative connotation of him, making it seem as if he intentionally did it to honor this woman, by positioning himself below her.
Reading a poem by Emily Dickinson can often lead the reader to a rather introspective state. Dickinson writes at length about the drastically transformative effect a book may have upon its’ reader. Alternating between iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, Dickinson masterfully uses the ballad meter to tell a story about the ecstasy brought by reading. In poem number 1587, she writes about the changes wrought upon the reader by a book and the liberty literature brings.
For example, Emily Dickinson illustrates individualism by being a “Nobody” instead of being a “Somebody.” In “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” Dickinson says “How dreary--to be--Somebody!” She continues to say throughout the poem, being a somebody is always trying to make everybody like them.
Emily Dickinson was a polarizing author whose love live has intrigued readers for many years. Her catalog consists of many poems and stories but the one thing included in the majority of them is love. It is documented that she was never married but yet love is a major theme in a vast amount of her poetry. Was there a person that she truly loved but never had the chance to pursue? To better understand Emily Dickinson, one must look at her personal life, her poems, and her diction.
The famous well-known poet, Emily Elizabeth Dickinson, was born on December 10, 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts. Growing up, she was busy with schooling, religious activities, gardening, baking, and exploring nature. Her family was well known in Massachusetts; her dad was a member of the governor’s cabinet and a US Congressman. In 1840, she attended Amherst Academy. At Amherst Academy, she was an excellent student. Many said she caught much attention and was very original in the way she presented herself. Dickinson’s poetry has a great amount of scientific vocabulary and she gained most of her knowledge about it at this academy. Seven years later, she enrolled in Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. At Mount Holyoke, she was academically successful and was very involved. Like most institutions at the time, Mount Holyoke believed that the students’ religious lives were part of responsibility. Dickinson refused to take part of the school’s Christian evangelical efforts. She had not given up on the claims of Christ, but didn’t think it was an important matter.
For example, in Emily Dickinson's poem, "I'm nobody! Who are you? Shows that she is excited about being herself and not letting the society change her views. She says "How dreary – to be – somebody! How public – like a Frog – To tell one’s name – the June livelong (line 3-5).
...ntuate the humor in the juxtaposition of the objects in order not to trivialize her own beliefs, but allows enough humor to enter the description to stamp the poem with the child-like free spiritedness found in ...Nobody.... Again in this poem, the poetess' desire for seclusion and unconventionality is expressed eloquently through a light-handed treatment of the subject matter.
Literary Analysis of Emily Dickinson's Poetry. Emily Dickinson is one of the most famous authors in American history, and a good amount of that can be attributed to her uniqueness in writing. In Emily Dickinson's poem 'Because I could not stop for Death,' she characterizes her overarching theme of Death differently than it is usually described through the poetic devices of irony, imagery, symbolism, and word choice. Emily Dickinson likes to use many different forms of poetic devices and Emily's use of irony in poems is one of the reasons they stand out in American poetry. In her poem 'Because I could not stop for Death,' she refers to 'Death' in a good way.
I am glad we got this poem because I have some things I would like to say about this weird acting woman. In my town were I come from their was a girl who acted just like this lady. This girl would not talk to anyone, she would run away all the time, she tried to commit suicide a couple of times, but did not succeed. Her parents it seemed they would be always looking for he all the time. So finally one day they decided to put her into a hospital to see what was causing her to act like this. In my mind I think she was depressed because she did not have any friends. And according to my knowledge Emily Dickinson was the same way.
“I’m Nobody!Who are you?Are you Nobody too?”These are the unique words that Emily wrote to show what she wants her readers to know.Emily Dickinson was a reserved person who enjoys the idea of being alone.She always wore white and shut herself out so she could make her writing about the truth of how people really feel. Emily’s style of writing was way different from writers in her time period.One poem that shows the personality of Emily Dickinson's “I’m Nobody!”.In the poem of “I’m Nobody!”,Emily Dickinson uses tone,word choice,and point of view to reveal that it’s probably more preferable to be lonely instead of a somebody and that she wants the reader to understand that it’s okay to feel and be lonely.
In the poems of Emily Dickinson, there are many instances in which she refers to her seclusion and loneliness, and how wonderful the two can be. In a book entitled, Emily Dickenson: Singular Poet, by Carl Dommermuth, she writes: "She (Dickinson) apparently enjoyed a normal social life as a school girl, but in later years would seldom leave her home. She was passionate yet distant." This distance Dommermuth speaks of is quite evident in Dickinson's works. Dickinson not only loves her loneliness but also feels as though she cannot live without it.
Emily Dickinson, a radical feminist is often expressing her viewpoints on issues of gender inequality in society. Her poems often highlight these viewpoints. Such as with the case of her poem, They shut me up in Prose. Which she place herself into the poem itself, and address the outlining issues of such a dividend society. She is often noted for using dashes that seem to be disruptive in the text itself. Dickinson uses these disruption in her text to signify her viewpoints on conflictual issues that reside in society. From the inequality that women face, to religion, to what foreseeable future she would like to happen. All of her values and morales are upheld by the dashes that Dickinson introduces into her poems.
Emily Dickinson was known well for her solitude nature to the point of never leaving her house after dropping out of Mount Holyoke College. She was never fond of being out in the public light and at one point in her life even stated she thought it was ridiculous to have her poems published. This feeling of wanting to not be famous and enjoying the solitude is emphasized in her poem “I’m Nobody! Who are you? (260)” published in 1891. Using similes and pronouns Dickinson gives a sense of talking to a dear friend, the reader, on why she is happy to be nobody.