Trumbull Stickney | |
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| Born | Joseph Trumbull Stickney (1874-06-20)June 20, 1874 Geneva, Switzerland |
| Died | October 11, 1904(1904-10-11) (aged 30) Cambridge, Massachusetts, US |
| Education | |
| Occupation | Poet |
Joseph Trumbull Stickney (June 20, 1874 – October 11, 1904) was an Americanclassical scholar andpoet.
He was born inGeneva and spent much of his early life inEurope.[1] His father was Austin Stickney, A.B. Harvard 1852, professor of Latin at Trinity College, Hartford, and his mother was Harriet Champion Trumbull Stickney, of a Connecticut family descended from Gov.Jonathan Trumbull.[1] He attendedHarvard University from 1891, when he became editor of theHarvard Monthly and a member ofSignet Society, to 1895, when he graduated magna cum laude. He then studied for seven years in Paris, taking a doctorate at theSorbonne. He wrote there two dissertations, a Latin one on the Venetian humanistErmolao Barbaro, and the other onLes Sentences dans la Poésie Grecque d'Homère à Euripide. The latter is openly indebted toThe Birth of Tragedy and to Stickney's study of theBhagavad Gita under the tutelage ofSylvain Lévi.[2] Stickney's was the first Americandocteur ès lettres.
He then published a first book of verseDramatic Verses (1902) and took a position as Instructor in Classics at Harvard (1903), but died inCambridge of abrain tumor a year later.[1][3] Stickney belongs to the number of Harvard poets (or the Harvard Pessimists) who died young, such asThomas Parker Sanborn,George Cabot Lodge,Philip Henry Savage andHugh McCulloch.
Stickney's poem "Song" (which describes the earth ebullient in late spring, and the cuckoo singing "not yet") is plagiarized in theRobert De Niro 2006 filmThe Good Shepherd by aYale professor of English, acted byMichael Gambon as Dr. Fredericks, in a failed attempt to seduce the protagonist, portrayed byMatt Damon. Two of the poems of Stickney – "Mnemosyne", and "Eride, V" are included in the volume ofThe Best Poems of the English Language compiled by ProfessorHarold Bloom and published in 2004, 100 years after the death of the poet.[4]
