Trumbull Stickney

Joseph Trumbull Stickney (June 20, 1874 – October 11, 1904) was an American classical scholar and poet.

Biography

He was born in

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

brain tumour a year later.^[3] 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 Robert De Niro 2006 film The Good Shepherd by a Yale professor of English, acted by Michael Gambon as Dr. Fredericks, in a failed attempt to seduce the protagonist, portrayed by Matt Damon. Two of the poems of Stickney - "Mnemosyne", and "Eride, V" are included in the volume of "The Best Poems of the English Language" complied by Professor Harold Bloom and published in 2004, 100 years after the death of the poet.^[4]

Dramatic Verses (1902)
Les Sentences dans la Poésie Grècque d'Homère à Euripide (1903)
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
Poem 'Mnemosyne'

^ 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)
^ "Les sentences dans la poésie grecque d'Homère à Euripide". Société nouvelle de librairie et d'édition. 1903.
^ Obituary.
^ Best Poems of the English Language, Harper Collins, 2004, New York, New York

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

Authority control databases
International	FAST ISNI VIAF
National	France BnF data Germany Belgium United States Netherlands
People	Trove
Other	SNAC IdRef