A.E. Stallings

from nominator Christopher Ricks:

 

"The poems of A.E.Stallings are never less than the true voice of feeling, and always more. For one thing, they contain many feelings and many voices (including those of poets who have gone but who are here still in her translations, among them Lucretius and Hesiod). Moreover, there are energies other than those of feeling. The mind of Europe: it is a phrase that two of Stallings’s favourite poets, A.E.Housman and T.S.Eliot, happily wielded. A classicist as was Housman, an American as Eliot once was, at home in and with the Mediterranean, she is able to realize in her poems the myriad minds of Europe.

 

“For a Professor of Poetry I believe that I should choose an American”: T.S.Eliot in 1922. He spoke three times, in the one sentence, of “first-rate men” (my italics). In the mind of Eliot’s candidate, Irving Babbitt, “the classical culture is active” (his italics). And so it now is in the mind and art of this first-rate woman.

 

“It is not to the interest of English literature that the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford should pass to the servile, the indefinite, or the sluggish”. Eliot again. Well, that will certainly not happen in the present election. Among the candidates is Alicia Stallings, who is independent, definite, and energetic, as poet-translator, as teacher, and as open-minded and open-hearted friend to the art and craft of poetry.