A e stallings villanelle meaning

  • That the poem is a villanelle tells us on the one hand that she is a Mean I Approve of the Mayor Blowing Up the City.
  • The poet and scholar of mythological and classical studies draws us into the intimate and grandly epic, and with a taut, formalist hand and gifted musical ear.
  • As a Greek proverb (translated by Stallings in the poem, a villanelle, that opens the collection) observes, “Nothing is more permanent than the.

    • •

    A. E. Stallings has authored four collections of poetry, Archaic Smile (1999), Hapax (2006), Olives (2012), and most recently, Like (2018), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has also published three verse translations, Lucretius’s Onthe Nature of Things (2007), Hesiod’s Works and Days (2017), and an illustrated The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice (2019). A volume of selected poems, This Afterlife (2022), was published by FSG in the US and Carcanet in the U.K.

    She has received a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and fellowships from United States Artists, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. She is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She speaks and lectures widely on a variety of topics, and has been a faculty member at conferences such as the Sewanee Summer Writers’ Conference and Breadloaf. In October 2023, Stallings became the second woman to serve as Oxford Professor of Poetry si

  • a e stallings villanelle meaning

    • •

    A. E. Stallings, Whose Poems Use Classical Allusions to Explore Modern Life, Headlines Tonight’s Lowell Poetry Reading

    At a time when mostmodern poets are writing in free verse, A. E. Stallings’ work is distinct. She is arguably one of the finest formalist poets working today. Over the last quarter century, she has earned a reputation for poems that dexterously employ meter and rhyme and adhere to traditional verse forms: sonnets, couplets, quatrains, villanelles, ghazals, and sestinas. In her poem “Cardinal Numbers,” “glorious” is paired to rhyme with “uxorious.” A classicist by training, who now lives in Athens, Greece, her poems are also notable for their allusions to classical Greco-Roman mythology. She reaches back to antiquity to explore contemporary life, often invoking the persona of a Persephone, Pandora, or Penelope to examine the truths of what has been called the poet’s “archaeology of the domestic”—marriage, parenthood, etc. 

    The John D. and Catherine T. Mac

    •

    PoemShape

    A.E. Stallings recently published HAPAX, her latest book and published in 2006.

    Among contemporaries, Stallings makes for some of the most enjoyable reading. Her skill with language and form is foremost. Too few contemporary poets stick out their necks like Stallings, preferring the ease of free verse.

    Stallings poetry is clever and that can be taken in its complimentary or pejorative way. Her poems can be compared to Wilbur’s and especially to Edna Saint Vincent Millay; in certain respects, Dorothy Parker. They are cogent, masterfully fitting theme to form. When Stallings is off, though, she only writes prettily. Her language feels studied and affected; and she can’t help remind readers of the Victorian poets in the thrall of Greek myth. Most of all, few of her poems exceed the sum of their parts. One wonders if there are not more profound or deeper emotional experiences she is not sharing or if the formality of her poetry is a kind of barrier. The risk in form