Who is the speaker?

Today it’s my turn to give the weekly oral presentation, and the topic that Professor May had assigned to me is“the life of the poet, Emily Dickinson”. Compared with Walt Whitman whom we discussed last week. I found Emily Dickinson strikingly different. She seemed in fact to be the complete opposite of Whitman in her life and in her work. I would like to share briefly with the class some of the essential facts of her biography. Emily Dickinson was born in 1830 in Amherst, Mass, barely a decade after Whitman. In her early 20’s for reasons which still remain a mystery she began to withdraw from her ordinary contact with the world. For the remaining 30 years of her life she was seldom seen outside her home. In this respect she was quite unlike Whitman who loved the great outdoors. Emily Dickinson spent her solitary days corresponding with her friends and writing hundreds of remarkable poems, notably“I heard a fly buzz”and the poem we have read for today“I’m nobody”. Although she showed none of her poems to her family and sent some of her letters to friends. only four were published in her life time. Most of them, almost 1,200 poems were discovered in her room after she died in 1886 at the age of 56. These poems have established her as a major poet, and several modern critics consider her the greateSt woman poet in the English language. Eh, that’s about all I have. Is there any question? If not, we should probably begin talking about Dickinson’s“I’m nobody”, the poem Professor May assigned for this week’s class discussion.