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
Robert Southey's "His Books"
William Butler Yeats' "When You Are Old"
John Keats' "How many bards gild the lapses of time"
Dorothy Wordsworth's "Loving and Liking"
Emily Dickinson's "Tell all the truth but tell it slant–"
H. D.'s "Eurydice"
C. S. Lewis' "Stephen to Lazarus"
Paul Ruffin's "We Write Nasty Notes at the Academic Conference"
Scott Cairns' "Musée"
Ted Kooser's "After Years"
T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
William Shakespeare's "It Was a Lover and His Lass"
Louise Glück's "The Wild Iris"
Francis Thompson's "The Hound of Heaven"
William Ernest Henley's "Invictus"
John Donne's "No Man Is an Island"
Walt Whitman's "Pioneers! O Pioneers!"
Wendell Berry's "The Plan"
Seamus Heaney's "A Basket of Chestnuts"
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