I'm Nobody! Who Are You?

“I’m Nobody! Who Are You?” falls in line with what readers have come to expect about Dickinson’s poetic style. For example, the title comes from the first line of the poem, which editors added later; Dickinson did not title her poems. It was also quite common during Dickinson’s time to write in meter for poetry and lyrics, particularly in alternating syllables of six to eight per line and using iambs (an unstressed/stressed syllabic pattern), which Dickinson does in this poem. Dickinson regularly wrote in first-person with a speaker who sometimes did represent her and other times did not. In “I’m Nobody! Who Are You?” it is likely she was representing herself and her feelings in celebration of anonymity. On the other hand, perhaps the “I” does not represent her, as she could be satirizing the sentimental poets of her time who praised the heavens and completely downplayed their human role in all of it.

Dickinson’s regular use of dashes (not a choice her friend and literary critic Thomas Wentworth would recommend) rather than a period or a comma, and her capitalization of words within the poem, have become typical of her work and are found in this poem as well.