I'm Nobody! Who Are You?

“I’m Nobody! Who Are You?” is a popular lyric poem with interpretive possibilities written by American poet Emily Dickinson, published posthumously in Poems, Series 2 in 1891. Dickinson has become one of the most widely read American poets after her death due to her pithy passionate poems that get to the heart of an idea and use punctuation in unique ways, her intimate letters, as well as her reclusive, unmarried lifestyle, which leads to much speculation. In fact, “I’m Nobody! Who Are You?” tackles the theme of a public versus a private life. Dickinson has spawned many contemporary works of art reimagining her life, including the 2016 biographical film A Quiet Passion with Cynthia Nixon as Dickinson, the 2018 romantic comedy Wild Nights with Emily with Molly Shannon, and the 2019 contemporary Apple TV series Dickinson with Hailee Steinfeld. In addition, her fanbase includes the members of the Emily Dickinson International Society, founded in 1988, which led to the beginning of the biannual academic journal The Emily Dickinson Journal in 1991.

Poet Biography

Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1830, with a lineage that includes the founder of Amherst College, her grandfather Samuel Dickinson. She was known to be a well-behaved child with an interest in playing piano. Education was important to her lawyer-father, as he always wanted to know what his children learned in school. Dickinson’s letters suggest affection for her father but a much more distant relationship with her mother.

At 10 years of age, Dickinson enrolled at Amherst Academy, a former boys-only school. She was an excellent student in math, history, classical literature, and various sciences, including botany, which led to a lifelong interest and influence on the content of her poems. After the academy, she attended Mary Lyon’s Holyoke Female Seminary, which would later become Mount Holyoke College, but she only attended for 10 months due to unconfirmed reasons.

Though Dickinson never married, she formed attachments to particular men including the principal at the academy Leonard Humphrey, and attorney Benjamin Franklin Newton, who worked with her father. Newton likely influenced Dickinson with poetry from William Wordsworth and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Letters from New York from abolitionist/women’s rights activist Lydia Maria Child.

She was also familiar with the Bible, though her attendance at religious services was short-lived, and was strongly influenced by William Shakespeare’s plays and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, among others.

In her twenties, Dickinson formed a relationship, sometimes scholars question it as romantic, with her brother Austin’s wife Susan Gilbert, sending her more than 300 hundred letters. This relationship included Gilbert providing editorial advice, which Dickinson would incorporate into her work.

Throughout the 1850s, Dickinson became increasingly confined to her home, taking care of domestic duties that her chronically ill mother could no longer do. During this time, she put together manuscripts of the poems she had written over the years, which amounted to almost 800 poems. In the latter half of the decade, she met the owner of the Springfield Republic Samuel Bowles to whom she sent her letters and poems. Seven of her poems were published in the magazine. The poems were listed as having an anonymous author and received much editing to include titles and standardized punctuation. As a prolific letter writer, Dickinson composed three to someone simply known as “master” in the late 1850s that are now known as “The Master Letters,” which scholars continue to discuss.

The next decade saw Dickinson become even more homebound but also productive in her writing. She even wrote to literary critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson in 1862, asking him about the value of her poems and seeking literary guidance. She writes to him, “If fame belonged to me, I could not escape her” (Dickinson, Emily. "Letter." Dickinson Electronic Archives). In the mid-1860s, however, her writing output declined, and she dressed primarily in white, talking to people only from behind a door rather than face to face. What she lacked in physical company, she made up for in copious letters and gifts to friends and acquaintances.

In the 1870s and 1880s, major changes developed in her family circumstances, including her father’s death in 1874 and her mother’s stroke one year later, leading to her mother’s decline and eventual death in 1882. Dickinson also lost her companion Judge Otis Phillips Lord in 1884 after sharing literary interests, including Shakespeare, and weekly letters. Also in the 1870s, Dickinson saw her last poem published during her lifetime in A Masque of Poets after some convincing from publisher Helen Hunt Jackson, a former classmate of Dickinson’s from Amherst Academy. This poem also saw edits and was published anonymously.

In her final years, Dickinson stopped putting manuscripts of her poems together and asked her sister Lavinia to burn her letters. She felt the pang of all the deaths around her. After several months of sickness and confinement, she died in 1886 at age 55.

During her lifetime, Dickinson wrote often but only published 10 poems and one letter. Her sister did burn many of Dickinson’s letters, as promised, but also discovered the 1,789 poems Dickinson kept private and shared them with her brother’s wife Susan Gilbert and her brother’s mistress Mabel Loomis Todd. Dickinson’s first collection of poetry simply titled Poems was published in November 1890, edited by Higginson and Todd. Arguments on what to do with the manuscripts among the parties ensued for 50 years with various familial and non-familial members publishing Dickinson’s poems over time, including Austin’s daughter and Dickinson’s niece Martha Dickinson Bianchi and Todd’s daughter Millicent Todd Bingham.

Poem Text

I’m Nobody! Who are you?

Are you – Nobody – too?

Then there’s a pair of us!

Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!

How public – like a Frog –

To tell one’s name – the livelong June –

To an admiring Bog!

Dickinson, Emily. “I’m Nobody! Who Are You?” 1998. Academy of American Poets.

Summary

In the first stanza of this seemingly autobiographical two-stanza poem, the speaker calls attention to her nobody status and reaches out to ask if someone else is also a nobody, so the two would share the same status. The speaker encourages secrecy about being a nobody, because if others knew they would tell others and soon it would become public. In the second stanza, the speaker expresses displeasure at anyone who is the opposite of a nobody—a somebody, which they compare to a frog who spends the summer croaking to all who might listen in the swampland.