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Dickinson's 'I Am Alive - I Guess -.' (Emily Dickinson)

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From: The Explicator
Date: 19940101
Author:San, Debra

Emily Dickinson's 'I Am Alive - I Guess -' is a poem that begins with a pathetic declaration of self doubt but ends with the exultant exclamation of self awareness and the joy of being alive. The poem is Whitmanesque in its examination of self. Unlike Whitman's 'Song of Myself,' however, Dickinson's poem does not celebrate the self from the start. Rather, Dickinson discovers her self as she writes the poem. The poem, therefore, is the medium by which the writer realizes self-assertion that leads to self-transcendence into infinity.

Had Whitman written a poem beginning "I am alive," his ...

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