Author
Shelley is the English counterpart to Goethe in Fuller’s reading life — the poet she engaged with most deeply in the English tradition, at every level from childhood encounter to late critical essay. The Hymn to Intellectual Beauty she encountered young; the essay on his work in Life Without and Life Within (c. 1841) is the companion piece to the Goethe essay, both representing her most sustained critical writing on any single author. She translated passages, quoted him extensively, and was still copying Shelley out for friends in 1850. A Defence of Poetry appears as a theoretical touchstone for her own criticism; Julian and Maddalo is her most-cited single poem, with Adonais, Prometheus Unbound, Prince Athanase, and To a Skylark across letters and essays.
Still copying Shelley in 1850
In the last year of her life Fuller was transcribing Shelley for friends — the intensity that began in childhood with the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty never became routine.
Shelley is the one central English-language author with no document yet tagged to him on digitalfuller.org; passages appear in journals and letters catalogued but not yet linked.
Additional passages preserved in the Memoirs (1852)
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 →
Passages where the evidence goes beyond allusion to indicate that Fuller had Percy Bysshe Shelley’s work in hand — an explicit statement of reading, sustained excerpting or translation, or a specific reading episode recorded by those who knew her.
“I have copied for you the passage I mentioned in Shelley, as applicable to your opinions... The lines are from Prince Athanase”
Letters of Margaret Fuller ed. Hudspeth · According to his wife, Shelley wrote "Prince Athanase" in December 1817. She published it for the first time in 1824.
"I have copied for you the passage I mentioned in Shelley... from Prince Athanase" documents substantial verbatim copying of a specific passage.
“I do not look at Shelley's journals &c for me, but for him He inspires tenderness.”
Letters of Margaret Fuller ed. Hudspeth · May 31st 1840
First-person present account of engaging with Shelley's journals ('I do not look at... for me, but for him'), continuing an explicit reading thread from the same letter series.
“I have been reading in Shelley's journals how he continued to suffer in Italy”
Letters of Margaret Fuller ed. Hudspeth · Saturday eveg [25 April] 1840
Explicit 'I have been reading in Shelley's journals' with specific date.
1824–1839
Childhood through early essays — the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty encountered in childhood; Shelley present but not yet the subject of sustained analysis.
1840–1844
Critical essay and Dial years — the essay on Shelley written (c. 1841), companion to the Goethe essay, alongside translation work.
1845–1850
Tribune years and beyond — her most concentrated Shelley period: Tribune criticism, copies of Shelley sent to friends, passages quoted in letters through 1850.
“When still in childish years, the “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” fell in our way. [...] with the words “Have I not kept my vow?””
“This is from Shelley and was not, I feel pretty sure, in your volume. Even if you do not like him generally you will the exquisite pensiveness of this / When passion’s trance is overpast...”
“Hail to thee, blithe spirit / Bird thou never wert. / That from heaven or near it, / Pourest thy full heart / In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.”
“It is not true as Shelley describes / That here lies / "a shattered visage, whose frown / And wrinkled lips and sneer of cold command, / Tell that its sculptor well those passions read / Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things / The hand that mocked them and the heart / that fed.”
“This is from Shelley and was not, I feel pretty sure, in your volume. Even if you do not like him generally you will the exquisite pensiveness of this / When passion's trance is overpast / If tenderness and truth could last / And live, while all wild feelings keep / Some mortal slumber, dark and deep, / I should not weep, I should not weep. / After the slumber of the year / The woodland violets reappear, / All things revive in field and grove / And sky and sea-but two which move / As for all others life and love.”
“But, though soaring upward on a strong pinion, his flights are never prolonged, and in this province, which earnestness and justness of sentiment, simplicity of imagery, and a picturesque turn in expression, seem to have marked out as his own, he is surpassed by Shelley, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, from their greater power of continuous self-impulse.”
Translated by Fuller
Analyzed in depth
Further works
Further works documented in the catalogue
Selected passages from Fuller’s own writings, in chronological order.
“though it be the desire of the moth for the Star.”
Fuller, Margaret. "On Love." Boston Public Library Archives & Special Collections; MS Am. 1450; Box: 3, Folder: 121.
Inferred Fuller alludes to 'the desire of the moth for the Star' without naming Shelley or the poem; the phrase is the distinctive fourth stanza of Shelley's lyric 'To ——' (1821/1824).
“And weep away this life of care." / I am indeed, a "tired child”
Fuller, Margaret. "On a Visit at Atheneum." Boston Public Library Archives & Special Collections; MS Am. 1450; Box: 3, Folder: 122.
Inferred Fuller quotes two closely related phrases — 'And weep away this life of care' and 'a tired child' — both in quotation marks and both from the same Shelley stanza; she names no author or title.
“Shelley was all eros.- How full! how bright would have been his final conviction!”
Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Vol. VI. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.
Inferred Fuller names Shelley and makes a critical judgment that "Shelley was all eros," contrasting him with Coleridge as a poet driven by desire rather than intellectual uncertainty, demonstrating clear critical engagement though no specific work is named.
“Pour moi, a Shelley stirs my mind more than a Milton and I'd rather be excited to think than have my tastes gratified”
Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Vol. VI. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.
Inferred Fuller explicitly names Shelley and compares his intellectual effect to Milton's, stating that Shelley stirs her mind more because she prefers intellectual stimulation to aesthetic satisfaction, a significant critical judgment about her reading preferences.
“It is not true as Shelley describes / That here lies / "a shattered visage, whose frown / And wrinkled lips and sneer of cold command, / Tell that its sculptor well those passions read / Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things / The hand that mocked them and the heart / that fed.”
She attributes the lines to Shelley explicitly.
“And no writer is more fully penetrated with the mild and equalizing spirit of Christianity than Shelly in his mature days. — I think of love and _Shelley_”
Fuller, Margaret. "Journal 1833–1834." Houghton Library, Harvard University; bMS Am 1086 (4); Box 5 (83).
“and why was it reflected so falsely through / "life’s many coloured dome of painted / glass" upon their youthful, anxious / gaze.”
Fuller, Margaret. "Journal 1833–1834." Houghton Library, Harvard University; bMS Am 1086 (4); Box 5 (83).
Inferred Quoted phrase ‘life’s many coloured dome of painted glass’ is from Shelley’s Adonais (1821), stanza LII, line 462: ‘Life, like a dome of many-colour’d glass, / Stains the white radiance of Eternity’. The author is not named here, but the title is identified through the distinctive phrase.
The author is not named here, but the title is identified through the distinctive phrase.
“We learn in suffering what we teach in song_”
Fuller, Margaret. "Fragmentary Reading Notes and Autobiographical Reflections." Houghton Library, Harvard University.
Inferred Quoted phrase 'We learn in suffering what we teach in song' matches Julian and Maddalo (1818, published 1824). The exact phrase 'Most wretched men / Are cradled into poetry by wrong, / They learn in suffering what they teach in song' appears in Shelley's Julian and Maddalo (written 1818; published posthumously 1824 in Posthumous Poems).
“Vouchsafe then thy protection that I may "hold on in courage of soul.”
Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Vol. I. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983.
Inferred Fuller quotes the phrase "hold on in courage of soul" from Shelley's "On Death," published in 1816 with Alastor, slightly compressing the original wording when she incorporates it as a maxim.
“Shelley shows himself fully possessed by this idea in his preface to Prometheus unbound.”
Fuller, Margaret. "Journal April 1839." Houghton Library, Harvard University; bMS Am 1086 (Box A); Box 5 (99).
Inferred Fuller (in crossed-out note, p. 10) names Shelley and 'his preface to Prometheus unbound' specifically. Fuller observes that Shelley 'shows himself fully possessed by this idea in his preface to Prometheus unbound.' This is a reference to Shelley's famous preface to Prometheus Unbound (published 1820 in Prometheus Unbound: A Lyrical Drama in Four Acts, London: C. and J.
“I have been reading in Shelley's journals how he continued to suffer in Italy and he was affected very much as I am.”
Hudspeth identified: Mary Shelley's Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments (London: Moxon, 1840) contained Shelley's journals, his Defence of Poetry, and his letters.
“I wish you would read his Essay "The defence of poetry" Mr Wheeler will lend it you. I have his copy now.”
“I see Shelley in his letter to Gifford makes the same distinction in favor of Keats's Hyperion over his other works that you did.”
“even from your point of view the Defence of Poetry seems to me excellent It seems to me not "stiff" but dignified, and no otherwise "academical" than as showing a high degree of culture.”
Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Vol. II. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984.
“As to what you say of Shelley, it is true that the unhappy influences of early education prevented his ever attaining clear views of God, life, and the soul.”
Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Vol. II. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984.
“On Shelley and Keats_ Quote Shelley's letter to Gifford.”
Fuller, Margaret. "Journal 1840." Houghton Library, Harvard University; bMS Am 1086 (85); Box 5 (85).
Passages surviving only in the posthumous Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, compiled by Emerson, Channing, and Clarke.
“Shelley, Coleridge, and Keats she also sought to interest me in. The first in his beauty was too disordered for my approbation.”
Fuller, Richard Frederick. Recollections of Richard F. Fuller. Boston: privately printed, 1936.