Emily Dickinson Informal Diction

Poetry is a literary work that is meant to evoke an emotional response from the reader. A poet uses creativity and imagination to capture the reader’s attention. Most poems are concise, shorter than other literary works, but never short of substance. Often times poetry can take simple, ordinary details and give them new meaning and significance that may not have been appreciated otherwise. In Emily Dickinson’s poem, “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” Dickinson uses several different literary techniques that capture the reader’s attention and trigger an emotional response.
First of all, Emily Dickinson chose to use informal diction in this poem. Informal diction is the use of informal, conversational language, or slang to give the poem
This is a calculated decision, designed to connect the reader to the poem on an emotional level. Dickinson must have realized that everyone has felt feelings of rejection and isolation, therefore she focused her writing to relate to the reader and speak to those personal experiences. In an early evaluation of Dickinson’s work, a critic wrote, “This poetry is as characteristic of our life as our business enterprise, our political turmoil, our demagoguism, or our millionaires” (Wells,
However, some might argue that she was trying to identify and make sense of a frame of mind she did not understand. One reviewer wrote, “Because Dickinson is Dickinson, she sees “oppositely”, love (and gender) can only be understood in relation to its opposite” (Pollak, 1999). Even to this day academics still discuss and argue over the paradoxes and obscurities of Dickinson 's life and work. There is one fact about Emily Dickinson that is not up for debate and that is Dickinson’s personal desire for privacy. She was not a well-known poet until after her death in 1886 (Moore,