1861 | Amherst

Anonym

I’m Nobody! Who are you?

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you—Nobody—too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! They’d banish us—you know!

How dreary—to be—Somebody!
How public—like a Frog—
To tell your name—the livelong June—
To an admiring Bog!

Black and white photograph of Emily Dickinson sitting next to a desk.
Contributor

Emily Dickinson

Poem 260. The daughter of a one-term congressman, Dickinson underwent a stern Calvinist upbringing, lived her whole life in Amherst, Massachusetts, and grew increasingly reclusive, preferring epistolary relationships to social ones. She wrote a total of around 1,800 poems, only ten of which are known to have been published in her lifetime. She died of a stroke at the age of fifty-five in 1886.