Shortly after Emily Dickinson’s death, her
sister Lavinia discovered nearly 1,800 poems hid-
den away in the poet’s bedroom, some sewn into
booklets, many on loose pieces of paper. With
this discovery began an appreciation of the
poet’s enormous creative output and a commit-
ment by Lavinia and others to seeing the poetry in
print. Questions of editorial practice and by
whom and when these poems ought to be pub-
lished also emerged. Many of the poems were
edited early on by Higginson and Mabel Loomis
Todd; these were published in a series of three
volumes. Higginson and Todd were subsequently
criticized for having taken the liberty to regularize
punctuation and capitalization to conform to
standard practices of the time. Todd’s 1894 edi-
tion ofLetters of Emily Dickinsoncame under
attack in the twentieth century for editing practi-
ces that suggested an intentional effort on her
part to shape the public record of the poet’s life.
Two problematic biographical facts may offer
some explanation for the censoring efforts, both
connected to Susan Gilbert Dickinson. One was
the fact that the married Mabel Todd had engaged
openly in an extramarital affair with Austin
Dickinson while he was also married. The other
problematic fact was the nature of the intimate
long-term relationship between the poet and her
sister-in-law, to which much scholarship in the
later twentieth century and the early 2000s has
been devoted. The 1998 publication Open Me
Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to
Susan Huntington Dickinsonspurred much specu-
lation about the precise nature of the love these
two women felt for each other. In addition, during
the twentieth century, editorial theory and textual
practices regarding the handling of manuscripts
evolved considerably, and as the theory and prac-
tices changed so did the ways in which manuscripts
were prepared for publication. (See the work of the
Center for Editions of American Authors and the
later Center for Scholarly Editions).
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! 5
How public—like a Frog—
To tell one’s name—the livelong June—
To an admiring Bog!Poem Summary
Stanza 1
In the first stanza of ‘‘I’m Nobody! Who are
you?’’ the speaker announces she is a nobody,
and she asks the person to whom she speaks if
that person is a nobody too. The speaker sug-
gests the two of them keep their identities a
secret, since if they are found out, people in the
public eye will draw attention to them.MEDIA
ADAPTATIONSAlison’s Houseis Susan Glaspell’s 1931 play
based in part on Emily Dickinson’s life and
the controversy that attended the posthumous
publication of her work. Set in the Midwest
and using characters with fictional names,
Glaspell’s play takes place eighteen years
after a famous poet’s death when family mem-
bers gather in the historic home to prepare it
for sale and a cache of poems is discovered.
The play explores the opinions and feelings
that family members and outsiders may have
regarding newly discovered manuscripts and
how these works should be handled given the
privacy their author sought.
The Belle of Amherst, a one-woman play writ-
ten by William Luce, opened on Broadway on
April 28, 1976, to rave reviews. Julie Harris,
who won a Tony for her performance, recorded
the play for a PBS production, the DVD
recording of which is available for purchase.
Loaded Gun: Life, and Death, and Emily
Dickinson, a 2003 film by Jim Wolpaw and
Steve Gentile, presents various people’s views
of the poet and her work. Among others,
Julie Harris discusses playing the poet in the
stage productionThe Belle of Amherst,and
U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins discusses the
poet and reads one of his poems about her.
This film was partially funded by the Massa-
chusetts Foundation for Public Broadcasting
and is available online for purchase.I’m Nobody! Who are you?