Emily Dickinson’s poem “Success is counted sweetest” is a 12-line poem consisting of three quatrains. It meets the definition of a lyric poem, as it portrays the thoughts and feelings of the speaker regarding the complex experiences of success, desire, and failure. Dickinson wrote the poem in 1859, and it was published in 1864 in the Brooklyn Daily Union. The poem also appeared in a volume of anonymous poetry titled A Masque of Poets, also published in 1864. “Success is counted sweetest” is the only poem Dickinson wrote which was

published in a book during her lifetime.

In “Success is counted sweetest,” Dickinson’s speaker explores the contrast between those who experience and achieve victory and success, and those who do not, modeling how desire for something is often greater when the goal has not yet been attained. Dickinson’s poem also highlights the necessity of failure to provide an appreciation for success. The poem is considered part of the transcendentalist movement.

Poet Biography

Born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson was the second child of Edward Dickinson and Emily Norcross Dickinson. Dickinson received her education at both Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. Her life as a recluse impacted her writing, as well as her experience with the restrictions and expectations placed upon her gender and the influence of Transcendentalism on her moral views and religious beliefs.

Dickinson’s father, Edward, was a treasurer at Amherst College (which his own father, Dickinson’s grandfather, had helped to found), and he served a term in Congress. Dickinson’s mother was from an elite family from Monson, Massachusetts. Dickinson’s two other siblings were her older brother, Austin, and her younger sister, Lavinia.

During her early years of education, Dickinson attended Amherst Academy for approximately seven years before she went to Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. She only attended the seminary for a year before leaving, and the exact reason for her early departure is unknown. While attending these various institutions, Dickinson received praise for her aptitude in a variety of subjects, from composition to the sciences, and her botany class prompted her to compose an herbarium. When Dickinson left school, she returned to live at home with her parents in Amherst, Massachusetts at their estate, the Homestead.

Dickinson’s love of writing emerged during her teenage years. One friend, Benjamin Newton, gave Dickinson a copy of Emerson’s poetry, which proved to be an inspiration to her. She shared her own early poetry with her friend Henry Vaughn Emmons and maintained a close group of female friends, including Abiah Root, Abby Wood, Emily Fowler, and Susan Gilbert. During these early years, Dickinson also experienced loss and death, such as the death of her cousin Sophia Holland. Religious revivals of the time also led Dickinson to question the nature of faith and the soul. Though the rest of Dickinson’s family were largely evangelical Calvinists belonging to Amherst’s First Congregational Church, Dickinson herself never joined this, or any, institutionalized faith.

One of Dickinson’s closest friends, Susan Gilbert, married Dickinson’s brother in 1856. Susan and Austin moved into the estate next to the one where Dickinson lived with her parents and sister. It was Gilbert who would introduce Dickinson to another of her poetic inspirations, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. During her early 20s, Dickinson started to become more reclusive. She left home less and less, and she maintained a correspondence with select individuals via letter. From 1855 to 1859, Dickinson and her sister Lavinia spent much of their time nursing their invalid mother. While there are speculations she had amorous relationships with men and, possibly, one woman, and that she received at least one marriage proposal, Dickinson never married.

Academics have identified the years from 1858 to 1865 as the most productive period for Dickinson. She began piecing together her manuscript collections by writing out copies of her poems on clean paper and sewing them together. During this period of literary creativity, Dickinson would write approximately 40 booklets of poetry containing roughly 800 individual poems. During her lifetime, Dickinson shared her poetry most frequently with her sister-in-law. Only a handful of poems were published publicly, and without Dickinson’s permission, while the greater part of her collection remained private. Dickinson also shared her work with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, with whom she began exchanging work around April of 1862.

Dickinson’s last excursions outside of Amherst occurred between 1864 and 1865 when she traveled to Boston to receive treatment for iritis, an eye condition. When she returned home to Amherst, Dickinson would rarely leave her family’s estate (“1855 - 1865: The Writing Years.” Emily Dickinson Museum). During the last fifteen years of Dickinson’s life, she continued to write around 35 poems a year, but she no longer bound them into collections.

Later in life, Dickinson sustained more loss. Her father died in 1874 and her mother passed away in 1882. Dickinson took the death of her young nephew, Gib, in 1883 especially hard. After this last death, Dickinson fell ill herself, and she died at 55 on May 15, 1886 of a stroke. More contemporary analyses label the cause of Dickinson’s stroke as hypertension. After her death, Lavinia gathered her sister’s poems, and part of this collection appeared in 1890 as Poems by Emily Dickinson. A family friend named Mabel Loomis Todd assisted in transcribing Dickinson’s poems, while Thomas Wentworth Higginson helped edit the text. However, since the poems were edited to fit standard literary conventions of the time, some of Dickinson’s unique stylistic idiosyncrasies were lost. A full collection of Dickinson’s work was released in 1955.

Poem Text

Success is counted sweetest

By those who ne'er succeed.

To comprehend a nectar

Requires sorest need.

Not one of all the purple Host

Who took the Flag today

Can tell the definition

So clear of victory

As he defeated – dying – 

On whose forbidden ear

The distant strains of triumph

Burst agonized and clear!

Dickinson, Emily. “Success is counted sweetest.” 1864. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

The poem opens with a comment on the contrasting experiences between those who know success and those who do not. Those who have not experienced success or victory view it as more appealing and desirable than those who have.

The speaker further elaborates this point by giving readers an example of the contrasting experiences. The speaker explains how individuals who have the most need for sustenance, in the form of “nectar” (Line 3), will experience a greater emotional yearning for it. In the second stanza, the speaker elaborates on this point with a war-related anecdote. The speaker describes a victorious, militaristic cohort who are unable to describe success, even though they themselves are victorious. This group’s experience is contrary to that of the defeated party, who hears the victory celebration of their conquerors and agonizes over the sound, since they are not able to experience this joy of success personally.

According to the speaker of the poem, it is those who never experience victory who glorify it, much more than those who have experienced it for themselves.