Success, Without a Name

A Poetry Tale about Emily Dickinson, told by Hello Doggo.

How do you get Emily Dickinson into print? You need a famous friend, a lot of nerve, and a book with no names in it.

The friend was Helen Hunt Jackson, a celebrated writer who, like Dickinson, was born in Amherst in eighteen thirty. In eighteen seventy-six she wrote to her: You are a great poet — and it is a wrong to the day you live in, that you will not sing aloud.

Dickinson, naturally, did NOT sing aloud.

So Jackson found a loophole. A Boston publisher was putting out A Masque of Poets, an anthology in which every poem was anonymous. Dickinson resisted. Jackson pushed. In the end Jackson offered to send in a poem she already knew by heart: Success is counted sweetest, by those who ne’er succeed.

It came out in eighteen seventy-eight. The publisher had quietly tweaked her wording, too.

Then came the fun. Reviewers played guess-the-poet, and the favourite guess for Success was Ralph Waldo Emerson. The publisher even wrote to Dickinson afterwards to tell her so.

Meanwhile Jackson wrote a review of her own, and called the poem one of the strongest and finest wrought things in the book. She knew exactly who’d written it. She’d smuggled it in.

So there you are. Dickinson’s grandest public moment in her lifetime: a poem about success, credited to somebody else, praised by the friend who’d planted it.

Success is counted sweetest by those who ne’er succeed.

Or, in her case, by those who never get the credit.