18 pages • 36 minutes read
Emily DickinsonFame Is a Fickle Food (1702)
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1914A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Biographical Context
Emily Dickinson wrote short elegiac (elegy-like) poems for several people in her life and writers she admired. One candidate for the subject of “Fame is a fickle food” is a famous writer Dickinson knew: Helen Hunt Jackson. Dickinson and Jackson were childhood classmates at Amherst Academy and exchanged letters after Jackson moved to Colorado Springs.
Jackson, a celebrated poet in her own lifetime, attempted to get Dickinson to publish her poems. Jackson wrote to an ill Dickinson, “I wish you would make me your literary legatee & executor” (Emily Dickinson: Selected Letters edited by Thomas H. Johnson, pg. 312). However, Jackson died unexpectedly from stomach cancer. In a letter written shortly after her death in 1885, Dickinson says, “Helen of Troy will die, but Helen of Colorado, never” (Selected Letters, pg. 325). Jackson lives on in her published writings, but she is never able to write a letter to Dickinson again.
The birds that appear in “Fame is a fickle food” recall the times Dickinson referred to Jackson using avian imagery. In 1884, after Jackson wrote to Dickinson about breaking her leg, Dickinson replied, “I shall watch your passage from Crutch to Cane with jealous affection. From there to your Wings is but a stride — as was said of the convalescing Bird” (Selected Letters, pg. 310). In a letter responding to T.W. Higginson’s sonnet about Jackson’s death in 1885, Dickinson writes: “Not knowing when Herself may come / I open every Door, / Or has she Feathers, like a Bird, / Or Billows, like a Shore —” (Selected Letters, pg. 329). This aligns Jackson with the discerning crows rather than the “men” (Line 10) in “Fame is a fickle food.”
Even though she is not characterized as one of the fame-hungry men, Jackson’s fame was fleeting. Her successful writing career was cut short by illness. It poses the question of the usefulness of fame after death. Jackson could not personally enjoy her fame after she passed, and she is far less famous than Dickinson posthumously.
Literary Context
In addition to Jackson, Dickinson was influenced by poets such as William Shakespeare, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Browning, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. After her death, Dickinson became a canonical American poet who influenced many writers, including Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore. Dickinson’s innovative use of punctuation, especially dashes, inspired generations of poets. Furthermore, she is well-loved outside of the academy; non-academics often find her short lyrics with their plain style accessible. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics notes that Dickinson was “influenced by a Protestant version of the Christian plain style, the so-called Puritan plain style” (1041). “Fame is a fickle food” utilizes this style.
The lack of punctuation in “Fame is a fickle food” is another stylistic choice of Dickinson’s that expands the definition of poetry in the 19th century. The superiority of formally-structured poetry, specifically French forms of poetry, was “contested from the very beginning of poetic modernity in figures such as Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson,” according to The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (1067). Even into the 21st century, Dickinson’s choice to not punctuate her poems is highly influential.
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