Looking Dickinson's I M Nobody ! Who Are You?

Looking Dickinson’s “I’m Nobody! Who are You?” From Different Critical Lenses
“I’m Nobody! Who are You?” is a satirical poem written by Emily Dickinson that mocks the pretentious beliefs of the public sphere. Dickinson comically belittles ‘the famous’ published writers whom only write for their fame and monetary means, referring to the writers promoting their publicity as “like a frog”. While it seems though the general idea of “I’m Nobody! Who are You?” is about the egotistical people wanting to promoting themselves for success, other interpretations can be surmised by approaching it through the various critical lenses. In this case, I will explore the poem through implementing the methods of New Criticism and Reader- Response Criticism, in which both methods are similar and different in their approaches to a text.
New Criticism, part of Formalism, is an approach that examines a text just by the words on its page. There is no need for extra knowledge to read a text through in this theory, as biographical …show more content…
The poem starts out with the speaker shouting to another being, “I’m Nobody! Who are you?”, which shows the tension rising. Then the speaker seems to have found another person who is just as a “nobody” as him or herself, and feels reconciled with the person. Then in the second stanza, the speaker criticizes those who are “somebody”, publicly known for their names. The “frog” is used as a metaphor comparing those who want publicity for themselves, in which they belong in their “bog”, in a swamp full of the likes of them. As a belief of New Criticism, aesthetically qualities are favored by its critics, as literary devices such as imagery and metaphor are used. Some of the words of the poem are also capitalized, such as “Nobody”, “Somebody”, “Frog” and “Bog”. The capitalized words are the writer’s intentions to stress the comparisons between herself and the others who sell