For her “The Poems (We Think) We Know” column at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Alexandra Socarides writes about Emily Dickinson’s celebrated “I’m Nobody! Who are you?,” debunking its commonly held interpretation:
There is a seemingly stark private/public dichotomy laid out by the poem’s two stanza structure. In the first we meet a good Nobody, in the second a corrupt Somebody. But upon about the fifth read, you start to notice some things that deeply complicate the take-away we deliver up to school children.
