WorkThomas Hood
"Ode to Melancholy" (in The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies ? and Other Poems, 1827) Inferred
Thomas Hood (1799–1845) · in The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies ? and Other Poems, 1827
AnalyzedQuotedReadMentioned
Documented 1840–1845
Letters • Books
Selected engagements, in chronological order.
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 →
“I felt singular pleasure in seeing you quote Hood's lines on 'Melancholy.' I thought nobody knew and loved his serious poems except myself, and two or three others, to whom I imparted them.”
Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Vol. II. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984.
“All things are touched with melancholy / Born of the secret soul's mistrust, / To feel her fair ethereal wings / Weighed down with vile, degraded dust.”
Fuller, Margaret. Life Without and Life Within; or, Reviews, Narratives, Essays, and Poems. Edited by Arthur B. Fuller. Boston: Brown, Taggard and Chase, 1860.
Inferred Fuller quotes extensively from Thomas Hood’s 'Ode to Melancholy,' attributing the poem to him with the comment, “Hood knew and welcomed the dower which nature gave him at his birth, when he wrote thus.” The poem was published in Hood’s 1827 volume, The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies, Hero and Leander, Lycus the Centaur, and Other Poems.