A few days ago I wrote about my visit to Dinosaur Land, and that topic led me to discuss Amherst College’s new mascot, the purple Mammoth, and that got me to “Success is counted sweetest,” one of Emily Dickinson’s 55 poems which contain the word “purple" (HERE).
“Success is counted sweetest” was actually published in Dickinson’s lifetime – in 1864 – so some might wonder if this poem were a veiled reference to some battle in the Civil War; however, she wrote the poem in 1859.
“Success is counted sweetest” was actually published in Dickinson’s lifetime – in 1864 – so some might wonder if this poem were a veiled reference to some battle in the Civil War; however, she wrote the poem in 1859.
| It was first published anonymously in the Brooklyn Daily Union on April 27, 1864, and then It was republished in the anthology A Masque of Poets (1878) as part of a series of books published without writers' names. Dickinson’s friend Helen Hunt Jackson submitted the poem to the publisher, Thomas Niles, who included the poem in the book “slightly changed in phraseology." Jackson published a review of the book stating that the poem was "undoubtedly one of the strongest and finest wrought things in the book" but offered that speculation on its authorship would be a wasted effort. Readers believed it was written by Ralph Waldo Emerson. That and more info about that can be found HERE. |  |
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