The poem was initially three stanzas, but Hughes combined them in the 1965 republication. The scholar Christopher Metress feels that Hughes' removal of the dedication to Till and 1955 from the title caused the poem to lose "much of its powerful irony"; it wrote Till out and increased a focus on Mississippi. Metress argues that "any trace of Till's remains" are removed from the poem in its 1967 republication. The poem is not one of Hughes' most famous works, and many studies of his life leave it out, which Metress considers a gap in coverage. The professor Myisha Priest wrote an essay that compared the response to Till's killing in "Mississippi" with The Sweet Flypaper of Life. Priest noted that while Till was never referenced in the poem, it does reference the "specter of terror" around the lynching it focuses more on the event than Till himself.
