WorkRalph Waldo Emerson

“The Sphinx" — in The Dial, Vol. I, pp. 348-350”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) · January 1841

InferredHudspeth identified the verse 'Have I a lover / Who is noble and free / I would he were nobler / Than to love me' as from Emerson's 'The Sphinx,' first published in Dial I (January 1841): 348-50. She quotes four lines from the poem directly and contrasts this passage with the Lovelace lines that follow — saying the Emerson verse 'does not come home to me.'

AnalyzedQuotedReadMentioned

Documented 1841

Letters

Selected engagements, in chronological order.

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 work is selective, not exhaustive. Methodology →

DemonstratedConfirmed readingEvidence ↓

Confirmed reading

Passages where the evidence goes beyond allusion to indicate that Fuller had this work in hand — an explicit statement of reading, sustained excerpting or translation, or a specific reading episode recorded by those who knew her.

undatedThe SphinxDemonstrated
“Have I a lover / Who is noble and free / I would he were nobler / Than to love me.”
Letters of Margaret Fuller ed. Hudspeth
A substantial four-line quoted stanza from Emerson's "The Sphinx" implies the source text was consulted directly.

When Fuller engaged with this work

I. Childhood

II. Adolescence

III. Self-Directed

IV. Transcendentalist1record

V. New York

VI. Europe

✦. Memoirs (1852)

1810

1820

1832

1836

1844

1846

1850

1841—

Letter to William H. Channing

p213

analyzed · quoted · read

“The verse / Have I a lover / Who is noble and free / I would he were nobler / Than to love me. / does not come home to me though this does,”

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

Inferred Hudspeth identified the verse 'Have I a lover / Who is noble and free / I would he were nobler / Than to love me' as from Emerson's 'The Sphinx,' first published in Dial I (January 1841): 348-50. She quotes four lines from the poem directly and contrasts this passage with the Lovelace lines that follow — saying the Emerson verse 'does not come home to me.'

Hudspeth identified the verse 'Have I a lover / Who is noble and free / I would he were nobler / Than to love me' as from Emerson's 'The Sphinx,' first published in Dial I (January 1841): 348-50.