WorkJohann Wolfgang von Goethe
Prometheus (ode/dramatic fragment, written c. 1773; first published 1785)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) · Gedicht; written c. 1772–74; first published in F. H. Jacobi, Über die Lehre des Spinoza, Breslau, 1785; republished in Goethe's Schriften, 1789
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Documented 1838
Additional passages preserved in the Memoirs (1852)
Letters • Manuscripts
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 →
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.
“I suppose you have never read Goethe's Prometheus Here is a bit of it— You will see how the old Greeks felt sometimes...”
Letters of Margaret Fuller ed. Hudspeth · Providence 17th April [1838]
Engagement_type is Translated, which automatically qualifies for the Demonstrated tier.
“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.
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.
“which contained Margaret's translation of Goethe's 'Prometheus.”
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, William Henry Channing, and James Freeman Clarke, eds. Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli. 2 vols. Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Company, 1852.
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.