Trumbull Stickney
Joseph Trumbull Stickney (June 20, 1874 – October 11, 1904) was an American classical scholar and poet. His style has been characterised[by whom?] as fin de siècle and he is known[by whom?] for his sonnets in particular.
He was born in Geneva[1] and spent much of his early life in Europe. He attended Harvard University from 1891, when he became editor of the Harvard Monthly and a member of Signet society, to 1895, when he graduated magna cum laude. He then studied for seven years in Paris, taking a doctorate at the Sorbonne. He wrote there two dissertations, a Latin one on the Venetian humanist Ermolao Barbaro, and the other on Les Sentences dans la Poésie Grecque. His was the first American docteur ès lettres.
He then published a first book of verse Dramatic Verses (1902) and took a position as Instructor in Classics at Harvard (1903), but died in Boston of a brain tumour a year later.[2] Stickney belongs to the number of Harvard poets (or the Harvard Pessimists) who died young, such as Thomas Parker Sanborn , George Cabot Lodge, Philip Henry Savage and Hugh McCulloch.
Stickney's poem "Song" (which describes the earth ebullient in late spring , and the cuckoo singing "not yet") is plagiarized in the de Niro's 2006 film The Good Shepherd by a Yale professor of English in a failed attempt to seduce the protagonist, portrayed by Matt Damon.
Works
- Dramatic Verses (1902)
- The poems of Trumbull Stickney (1905) edited by George Cabot Lodge; William Vaughn Moody, and John Ellerton Lodge
- Trumbull Stickney (1973) edited by Amberys R. Whittle
References
- ^ His father was Austin Stickney, A.B. Harvard 1852, professor of Latin at Trinity College, Hartford, and Harriet Champion Trumbull Stickney, of a Connecticut family descended from Gov. Jonathan Trumbull (obituary,Harvard Graduates Magazine, 13, 1904:242-44)
- ^ Obituary.
- Homage to Trumbull Stickney: Poems (1968) edited by James Reeves and Seán Haldane
- The fright of time: Joseph Trumbull Stickney 1874-1904 (1970) by Seán Haldane
- The Country I Remember (1940) by Edmund Wilson in The New Republic