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
Li Po's "The Solitude of Night"
James Merrill's "The Octopus"
Hilaire Belloc's "Lines to a Don"
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The Poet's Calendar"
Naomi Shihab Nye's "The Traveling Onion"
Colley Cibber's "The Blind Boy"
Bertolt Brecht's "A Worker Reads History"
J. R. R. Tolkien's "The Road Goes Ever On"
Dr. Seuss' "Did I Ever Tell You..?"
Richard Wilbur's "The Death of a Toad"
Howard Nemerov's "De Anima"
Elizabeth Drew Barstow Stoddard's "Nameless Pain"
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The Poet and His Songs"
Edwin Arlington Robinson's "Richard Cory"
William Butler Yeats' "The Lake Isle of Innisfree"
Three by Edna St. Vincent Millay
W. H. Auden's "In Memory of W. B. Yeats"
Maurice Manning's "A Brief Refutation..."
James Matthew Wilson's "The Scar of Odysseus"
Rainer Maria Rilke's "Love Song"
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