Folklore & Mythology Figure
Documented in Fuller’s letters, books, journals, notebooks, manuscripts, memoirs
This page brings together documented engagements currently identified within the Fuller Reading Worlds catalog.
“Here is a man talking to Bill about Frankenstein— After getting the story from her he says "a very good outline but where is the moral?— Tieck would have been delighted— Moral of Frankenstein forsooth?—”
Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Vol. I: 1817-1838. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983.
“From Landor. Imaginary conversations, / I know three things wine, poetry and the world / says Joseph Scaliger, / Montaigne. You know one too many Then.”
Fuller, Margaret. "Notebook: Bouquet, 1836–1837." Houghton Library, Harvard University; bMS Am 1086 (43); Box 6 (43).
“I suppose you have never read Goethe's Prometheus. Here is a bit of it— You will see how the old Greeks felt sometimes, for even they knew the agonies of blight and imperfect development.”
Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Vol. I. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983.
“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.
“our Prometheus still held the divine fire on the point of his pencil”
L-2 [Letter 386, 21 August 1842, To Samuel G. Ward]
“We get the better because we do "Look before and after." But, from the same cause, we "Pine for what is not.”
Fuller, Margaret. Summer on the Lakes, in 1843. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1844.
Inferred The exact phrase 'pine for what is not' is from Shelley's 'To a Skylark' (1820), stanza 18: 'We look before and after, / And pine for what is not: / Our sincerest laughter / With some pain is fraught; / Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.'
“Prometheus, chained on his rock, and giving his heart to the birds of prey for aims so majestic, is scarcely a more affecting, a more reverent object, than the rich confectioner whose intellect has never been awakened [...] The fate of the ancient Prometheus was happiness to that of these, who must pay, for ever having believed there was divine fire in heaven, by agonies of despair, and conscious degradation”
Fuller, Margaret. Life Without and Life Within; or, Reviews, Narratives, Essays, and Poems. Edited by Arthur B. Fuller. Boston: Brown, Taggard and Chase, 1860. · p161, 163
Inferred The source is not explicitly named but is inferred from Fuller's use of the figure.
“Man no longer paints his proper nature in some form and says, "Prometheus had it — it is God-like;" but "Man must have it — it is human.”
Fuller, Margaret. Woman in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Greeley & McElrath, 1845.
Inferred Identification rationale not yet recorded.
“which contained Margaret's translation of Goethe's 'Prometheus.”
This archive entry identifies an instance of Margaret Fuller engaging with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's "Prometheus." Fuller presented her own translation of this celebrated ode, originally authored by Goethe around 1772-74 and first published in 1789, within an 1838 letter to a correspondent, as noted by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
“Miss Fuller had proposed the Grecian Mythology as the subject of the first conversations [...] He saw the oreads, naiads, nereids [...] Prometheus was made the type of Pure Reason; Jupiter, of Will; Juno, the passive side of the same, or Obstinacy; Minerva, Intellectual Power, Practical Reason; Mercury, Executive Power, Understanding; Apollo was Genius, the Sun; Bacchus was Geniality, the Earth's answer.”
Inferred Identification rationale not yet recorded.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, William Henry Channing, and James Freeman Clarke, eds. Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli. 2 vols. Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Company, 1852.
“Queen Mab," the "Prometheus," and other more formal works we have not been able to read much.”
B-1-17 [Shelley's Poems] p152
Undated
Pieces with no legible date. They are part of the record but cannot be placed on the lifeline.
“p10: 'The Prometheus is mentioned by Goethe as the index hand to his great resolve of his existence from which he never afterwards wavered'; p20: 'His greatest essays Werther, Faust, Egmont, Gotz, Prometheus and many of his best poems were the offspring of his free state.”
Fuller, Margaret. "Notes toward The Life of Goethe." Houghton Library, Harvard University.