Today’s poem ponders what love makes of language. Happy reading.
A.E. (Alicia) Stallings is the Oxford Professor of Poetry. She grew up in Decatur, Georgia, and studied classics at the University of Georgia and Oxford University. Her poetry collections include Like (2018), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Olives (2012), which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award; Hapax (2006); and Archaic Smile (1999), winner of the Richard Wilbur Award and finalist for both the Yale Younger Poets Series and the Walt Whitman Award. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry anthologies of 1994, 2000, 2015, 2016, and 2017, and she is a frequent contributor to Poetry and the Times Literary Supplement.
Stallings’s poetry is known for its ingenuity, wit, and dexterous use of classical allusion and forms to illuminate contemporary life. In interviews, Stallings has spoken about the influence of classical authors on her own work: “The ancients taught me how to sound modern,” she told Forbes magazine. “They showed me that technique was not the enemy of urgency, but the instrument.”
Stallings's latest verse translation is the pseudo-Homeric The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice (2019), in an illustrated edition with Paul Dry Books, and her latest volume of poetry is a selected poems, This Afterlife (2022, FSG). She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. She lives in Athens, Greece, with her husband, the journalist John Psaropoulos.
-bio via Poetry Foundation
Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Binsey Poplars"
Theodore Roethke's "Root Cellar"
J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Tale of Tinuviel"
Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken"
Rudyard Kipling's "If"
Jane Kenyon's "The Blue Bowl"
T.S. Eliot's "Rhapsody on a Windy Night"
Thomas Gray's "Ode to the Death of a Favorite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes"
Pablo Neruda's "A Dog Has Died"
Blaise Cendrars "Menus"
Roald Dahl's "The Centipede's Song"
T.S. Eliot's "The Naming of Cats"
Mary Oliver's "Beside the Waterfall"
Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Sonnet 44"
Wendell Berry's "September 2"
Seamus Heaney's "Scaffolding"
Rita Dove's "Ars Poetica"
Zbigniew Herbert's "From Mythology"
Billy Collins' "Introduction to Poetry"
Edgar Allan Poe's "Sonnet to Science"
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