I was reading about these few lovely familiar lines:
And the book said this “At the second line, the reader is forced to answer ‘yes.’”
It went on to say that if the first two lines were the entire poem (ie all the other lines were erased) that you would still have to answer ‘yes’ because of the way she asks it.
I agree that you have to answer “yes” but I don’t understand why. Why do you have to answer yes? What is it about the way she asks it that forces the reader to answer affirmatively? 
What book said that? When I read it, I just take it in, I don’t answer anything…kinda withhold judgment till I see where it’s going.
Carol
If you answer a simple no, you get the (implicit) statement “No, I’m not nobody.” A string of negatives is hard to understand. You could, of course, say “No, I’m somebody” which would be perfectly clear. But I don’t see where the reader is forced to answer “yes.” It seems to me it’s quite possible to answer “no.”
Writing Poems, Sixth Edition.
I don’t know that book, but it seems more to the point that those lines address the reader directly, drawing the reader in, rather than elicit any specific answer.
Carol
Emily Dickinson
by Wendy Cope
Higgledy-piggledy
Emily Dickinson
Liked to use dashes
Instead of full stops.*
Nowadays, faced with such
Idiosyncrasies
Critics and Editors
Call for the cops.
*Full Stop - Yurpeen for the punctuation mark “period”
It could be worse. My Mother had a penchant for …Ella Wheeler Wilcox! 
I’d be wary of any book that says a reader “is forced to.” Makes me mad, to tell you the truth!
Carol
That’s great!!
You are certainly not forced to give an answer at all but I wonder if the question doesn’t prompt an answer. You wouldn’t have to be aware of it. I’m not sure how you’d find out if an answer is prompted but a clever cognitive psychologist could doubtless come up with a way.
Yeah, I hate poems that force me to do things. Tyrannical.
Shouldn’t this thread be moved to the rubber room?
That rhyme with Frog and Bog grates.
Even “Dowd” and “Crowd” would be better. Didn’t the woman have a rhyming dictionary? Or friends? No, come to think of it, probably not friends.
Mind you, the worse poem of its kind must be “Lady Baby” by Wilhemina Stitch.
It starts “A lady Baby came today…”
I can’t find it on the internet. You should be grateful.
What I am objecting to is not the poem but the critical stance that implies that the text holds some single and definite meaning–certainly the way I was taught in high school–and that disregards what the reader brings to the text.
Carol
10-4. I agree entirely.
The poem is twisting my arm, the book is twisting my arm… don’t you start! 
Resistance is futile. You WILL take a nondogmatic approach to poetry.
taps switch against palm and raises eyebrow
Carol
oops I quoted instead of edited, so I just left the other post and left this one blank
edit: Here is a small biography of her http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Dickinson
I just like to sing it to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas.”
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 day
To an admiring bog!(Chorus) She’s the sweetest little rosebud that Texas ever knew,
Her eyes are bright as diamonds – they sparkle like the dew;
You may talk about your Clementine, and sing of Rosalee –
But the yellow rose of Texas is the only girl for me.
I put a couple of dashes in the chorus so it would like like Emily wrote it.
Sometimes I’ve felt like nobody,
At least nobody much,
Or maybe I just wished it:
Like a rabbit in a hutch.
A hutch: a place to stay inside,
A place to hide the light,
A place both calm and peaceful,
A place that’s always night.
But hutches aren’t for folks like me,
They’re just too dark and cold!
I need the warmth and sunshine,
With others to be bold.
–A. B. Walden
This discussion reminds me of something . . . and I think it’s “Dead Poet’s Society”. Didn’t Williams’ character toss out the textbook for his poetry class because it reduced poetry to (more or less) a mathematical equation?
I happen to like that Dickinson poem. I relate to it, but not because the poem somehow asked me to. I think most people would say “no” and not “yes”. So I don’t think her poem is supposed to relate to everyone who reads it, but is instead searching out people like her.
Like Dale, I agree, too.
I remember one of my english professors teaching the value of ‘purposefull vagueness’. His point was to give the reader enough content to draw them in and let the readers imagination fill out the picture. He said each reader will fill in diffent details so the purpose of the content was to set the tone and shades of what those details felt like.
As for my answer to, are you a nobody? I don’t think she’s looking for a yes or no answer. I thinks shes seeking the memory of a feeling; the feeling of being left out, being on the fringe, not being the center of attention, powerless to affect events, a nobody. Something that most of us have felt at one time or another. She’s just personifying that feeling.
Again I agree with Dale and Carol, mine is not the right interpretation. It’s just what I bring to the poem.