Trumbull Stickney

Who was Trumbull Stickney?

Joseph Trumbull Stickney 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 early life in Europe. He attended Harvard University from 1891, when he became editor of the Harvard Monthly and a member of Signet society, to 1895, when he graduated magna cum laude. He then studied for seven years in Paris, taking a doctorate at the Sorbonne. He wrote there two dissertations, a Latin one on the Venetian humanist Ermolao Barbaro, and the other on Les Sentences dans la Poésie Grecque. His was the first American docteur ès lettres.

He then published a first book of verse Dramatic Verses and took a position as Instructor in Classics at Harvard, but died in Boston of a brain tumour a year later. Stickney belongs to the number of Harvard poets who died young, such as Thomas Parker Sanborn, George Cabot Lodge, Philip Henry Savage and Hugh McCulloch.

Stickney's poem "Song" is plagiarized in the Robert De Niro 2006 film The Good Shepherd by a Yale professor of English, acted by Michael Gambon as Dr. Fredericks, in a failed attempt to seduce the protagonist, portrayed by Matt Damon.