Frieze Frame

Award-winning poet and Oxford Professor of Poetry, A. E. Stallings has marshaled poetry, personal letters, paintings, a dubiously translated 1801 firman, newspaper clippings, parliamentary proceedings, a Greek political campaign, and other lore in this deliciously detailed and gossipy history of the Parthenon (AKA, Elgin) Marbles. Her narrative encompasses the removal of the marbles from the Athenian Acropolis, their various misadventures before and after installation in the British Museum, from shipwreck to boxing matches, and the case for their return to Greece.

Bringing fresh air to a stale debate, the main concern of Frieze Frame is the effect the Marbles have had on poets, writers, painters, actors, architects, and vice versa--how poets and painters, for instance, have framed the Marbles’ place in art and culture. Keats, Byron, Cavafy, an aristocrat who loses his nose and his fortune, a bad painter who commits suicide, a general who takes his cat into battle, are among the cast of characters. In the author’s own words, ＂I am, to a certain extent, as interested in the strange stories and people surrounding the stones as the controversy [of their removal] and their fate.＂ Key for Stallings is the creative world of the Marbles, the ways that they appear in nineteenth (and twentieth) century writing and art, race theory and beyond, and the influence they have exerted in our society: cultural figures, maybe even characters, in their own right.

A. E. Stallings is an American poet, translator, and essayist who lives in Athens, Greece. She has published five collections of poetry: Archaic Smile (1999), Hapax (2006), Olives (2012), Like (2018), and This Afterlife (2022). She has published verse translations of Lucretius’s The Nature of Things and Hesiod’s Works and Days, both with Penguin Classics, and a translation of the pseudo-Homeric Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice (Paul Dry Books, 2019). In 2023, she was named the University of Oxford’s 47th Professor of Poetry. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Stallings is married to the journalist, John Psaropoulos, and has two children.