Trumbull Stickney

Joseph Trumbull Stickney (June 20 1874 - October 11 1904) was an American classical scholar and poet. His style has been characterised as "fin de siècle" and he is known for his sonnets in particular.

He was born in Geneva and spent much of his life in Europe.. He attended Harvard University from 1891 to 1895. He then studied for a doctorate at the Sorbonne. He wrote there two dissertations, one on Ermolao Barbaro, and the other on "Les Sentences dans la Poésie Grècque". His was the first non-francophone "doctorat ès lettres".

He then took a teaching position at Harvard, but died in Boston of a brain tumour about a year later.

Stickney's poem "Song" is plagiarized in the 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

*"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