Success and Dickinson

So far in class we have talked a lot about what it means to succeed; what the definition of ‘success’ is at Carnegie Mellon, what the definition of ‘success’ is in the real world, what it means to be successful and whether or not your own personal definition of success is one that compromises your happiness, etc. In her poetry, it seems as if Emily Dickinson rides the same train of thought that the transcendentalists did when they considered the notion of success.

In her poem “SUCCESS IS COUNTED SWEETEST,” Dickinson writes “Success is counted sweetest / By those who ne’er succeed. / To comprehend a nectar / Requires sorest need.” Although we as a class were notified before reading the poems that there were several common topics between the readings we have read so far this year and the issues tackled by Dickinson in her poems, I was startled by the similarities between Dickinson’s concept of ‘success’ and how easily it aligned with those of the transcendentalists. In this first stanza, Dickinson points out that those who seldom succeed are often the people who appreciate success the most. This, on it’s own, is a largely uncontroversial idea. In the second half of the stanza, however, Dickinson argues that in order to truly comprehend and appreciate something like success (a feeling that is positive but largely overlooked) their needs to be demand. I saw this as an idea that was largely transcendentalists. The transcendalists themselves, for example, are people who recognized a need for the appreciation and reverence of nature. Because of this, they were moved into action. Looking back to the various discussions we had about success at Carnegie Mellon, Dickinsons’ points make perfect sense; students like us, who are overworked everyday, have difficultly acknowledging and appreciating our personal successes. It is expected that we received good grades or earn ourselves professional positions, so expected that we often lose our success in frequency and fail to appreciate it when it comes.

In the second stanza, Dickinson writes “Not one of all the purple host / Who took the flag to-day / Can tell the definition, so clear, of victory”. Here it seems as if Dickinson is referring to winners on a playing field with the term ‘purple host’ and the essence of victory. This sentence continues into the third stanza where Dickinson writes “As he, defeated, dying, / On whose forbidden ear / The distant strains of triumph. / Break, agonized and clear”. Here, Dickinson is saying that the winners of the game will never truly understand their triumph, or at least not as well at the losers will. Unlike the winners, he losers will still have the desire to try, to work harder, to truly succeed by inward improvement. This to me was somewhat transcendentalist. The idea that truly winning is achieved through suffering a defeat and working harder is similar to the idea that we better society by removing ourselves and critiquing it.