Margaret Fuller’s Reading Worlds

Author

Ferdowsī(c. 940–c. 1020)

Ferdowsī is documented in Fuller’s letters (1840). One work is named, all in Letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the most intensive engagement recorded is “analyzed”.

Engagement
AnalyzedReadMentioned
Present in
Letters
Documented
1840

Additional passages preserved in the Memoirs (1852)

Totals count documented engagements, once at the earliest witness. How we count →

Reprints, Memoirs passages, and repeat notes within a single manuscript are shown but never counted twice. Evidence for this author is selective, not exhaustive. Methodology →

In Fuller’s words

“So talks the soft spring gale of the Shah Nameh. Gentle Sanscrit I cannot write. My Persian and Arabic you love not. Why do I write thus to one who must ever regard the deepest tones of my nature as those of childish fancy or wordly discontent?”
Shahnameh [Book of Kings] · Letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1840

When Fuller engaged with Ferdowsī

I. Childhood
II. Adolescence
III. Self-Directed
IV. Transcendentalist1record
V. New York
VI. Europe
✦. Memoirs (1852)1record
1810
1820
1832
1836
1844
1846
1850

This page brings together documented engagements currently identified within the Fuller Reading Worlds catalog.

Ferdowsī in Fuller’s reading world

Documentary evidence

Selected passages from Fuller’s own writings, in chronological order.

1840—

Letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson

p121
analyzed · read
“So talks the soft spring gale of the Shah Nameh. Gentle Sanscrit I cannot write. My Persian and Arabic you love not.”

Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Vol. II. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984.

Fuller names 'the Shah Nameh' explicitly; Hudspeth identified this as Firdawsi's Persian epic and identified the most likely edition as Atkinson's 1832 translation. Fuller has just written an elaborate Oriental tale (the desert wanderer / palm tree / oasis passage) in the idiom and spirit of the Shah Nameh, and then explicitly attributes it to that source: 'So talks the soft spring gale of the Shah Nameh.

Preserved in the Memoirs (1852)

Passages surviving only in the posthumous Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, compiled by Emerson, Channing, and Clarke.

1852—

Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli

p82
read
“So talks the soft spring gale of the Shah Nameh. Genuine Sanscrit I cannot write. My Persian and Arabic you love not.”

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, William Henry Channing, and James Freeman Clarke, eds. Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli. 2 vols. Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Company, 1852.

Inferred Margaret Fuller engages with Firdausi's epic poem, the Shahnameh or Book of Kings, by explicitly invoking it to describe the gentle cadence of her own prose, stating, "So talks the soft spring gale of the Shah Nameh." Her reference suggests familiarity with the foundational Persian work, even as she playfully dismisses less familiar linguistic comparisons ("My Persian and Arabic you love not").