privacy, the seduction of publicity. Implicit in the
act of writing and again in the act of preserving
one’s writing is the desire to communicate, to
identify oneself, to define one’s point of view, to
pronounce one’s interpretation of what matters in
the world of one’s own experience, all of this is
conveyed in the very existence of a cache of manu-
scripts. Among the manuscripts, one among
many little poems, ‘‘I’m Nobody! Who are you?’’
announces in its irony the problem: How does
one speak up and draw the curtain, look someone
in the eyes and ask a question and avert one’s eyes
at the same time? How does one take a backseat,
label oneself a nobody, and at the same time voice
a satirical depiction of the somebody up front as a
frog, endlessly croaking to the bog?
Perhaps it is correct to say the human search
is for that elusive comfortable middle ground
between complete anonymity and isolation, on
the one hand, and full exposure and global rec-
ognition, on the other. One wants to be heard, to
be in touch, even to put one’s talent forward, and
yet one also wants seclusion and quiet, a time to
be oneself out of others’ reach and in that seclu-
sion, perhaps, to pay attention to the creative
impulse that comes from within. It is a balancing
act moment by moment. Perhaps many people
would agree that Dickinson in writing her poetry
proclaimed a protest against the cultural context
that tried to define her. Writing must have also
been for her an affirmation of her personhood.
In this particular poem, the irony is that in dis-
tinguishing herself from the croaking somebod-
ies, the speaker sets herself up as above others.
Her statement proclaims her as a somebody. In a
curiously similar way, perhaps, Emily Dickinson
sought privacy in her own life and whispered a
few poems into the public eye, and yet in the
cache of poems she hoarded that were published
after her death, she sent myriad messages to the
world and demanded the attention that world
continues to give.
Source:Melodie Monahan, Critical Essay on ‘‘I’m
Nobody! Who are you?’’ inPoetry for Students, Gale,
Cengage Learning, 2010.
William Franke
In the following essay, Franke makes the case that
Emily Dickinson’s poetry is best understood as a
type of negative theology or apophatic discourse.
Emily Dickinson has long been regarded as
a peculiarly enigmatic figure for her puzzling
and oftentimes paradoxical poems, as well as
for her evidently idiosyncratic religious faith. I
will make no attempt to investigate that faith,
except as it is expressed in the poetry. However,
if we focus on the faith together with the poetry
as having the character of a negative theology,
much that is enigmatic, without ceasing to be so,
begins also to make a clear kind of sense. I con-
tend that Dickinson’s poetry is best understood
as a form of negative theology, or as what I will
call ‘‘apophatic’’ discourse. My guiding idea is
that Dickinson’s exploration of modes of nega-
tion in poetic language enabled her to discover
and express what are, in effect, negatively theo-
logical forms of belief. I will use ‘‘apophasis,’’ the
Greek word for negation, to designate the sort of
radical negation of language per se, of any lan-
guage whatsoever—rather than only of specific
formulations and of certain types of linguistic
content—that characterizes this outlook, or
rather sensibility, which suspects and subverts
all its own verbal expressions.
This term ‘‘apophasis’’ and its adjectival form
‘‘apophatic’’ evoke in the first place the ancient
Neoplatonic tradition of speculation concerning
the ineffable One as supreme principle of reality.
Likewise commonly designated as apophatic are
certain traditions of medieval mysticism concern-
ing an unutterably transcendent deity. In such
traditions, the encounter, in incommunicable
registers of experience, with the Inexpressible is
marked by a backing off from language (apo—
‘‘away from,’’ phasis—‘‘speech’’ or ‘‘assertion’’).
Of course, this backing off is itself then registered
in language, language that in various ways unsays
itself. The resultant apophatic modes of dis-
course, in their very wide diffusion throughout
Western culture, especially in the domains of phi-
losophy, religion, and literature, can be seen to
have had a decisive bearing on Dickinson’s writ-
ing. This can be inferred from the poetry itself,
whether it is conscious and deliberate on herDICKINSON’S POETRY IS PREGNANT WITH
THE SENSE THAT UNSAYABILITY ITSELF CAN SIGNIFY
AND THAT THE POEM’S VERY FAILURE TO SAY WHAT
IT STRIVES TO SAY MAY HARBOR ITS MOST
POWERFUL SIGNIFICANCE.’’I’m Nobody! Who are you?