Fame Is a Fickle Food (1702)

“Fame is a fickle food” by Emily Dickinson was published, posthumously, after her death in 1886. One of the earliest collections it appears in is The Single Hound, published by Little, Brown, and Company in 1914, where it is numbered SH14-4 (Single Hound, 1914, #4). The most accurate version can be found in the 1999 edition of The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by R.W. Franklin, and published by Harvard University Press. This source numbers it 1702 (FC1702: Franklin, Third Issue, #1702). Other sources number it FA1659 (from the first edition of Franklin’s book). It is consistently referred to by its first line, and can be seen in (handwritten) manuscript on the online Emily Dickinson Archive.

“Fame is a fickle food” is one of Dickinson’s many loose-leaf and undated, but signed, poems. Scholars believe it was written late in Dickinson’s life because she only began signing poems that she did not include in letters late in life. It is a short, free-verse elegiac (elegy-like) poem. Dickinson was heavily influenced by poets like Robert Browning and Helen Hunt Jackson; “Fame is a fickle food” can be read as an elegy for the latter. More generally, its themes are death, fame, and reputation.