Fame Is a Fickle Food (1702)

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.