Frieze Frame

Award-winning poet and Oxford Professor of Poetry, A. E. Stallings has gracefully marshaled poetry, personal letters, paintings, a dubiously translated 1801 firman, newspaper clippings, court records, a Greek political campaign, and other lore in this deliciously detailed 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, and the case for their return to Greece. The true concern of Frieze Frame, however, is the effect the Marbles have had on poets, writers, painters, actors, architects, and so on--that is, their place in art and culture. In the author’s own words, ＂I am, to a certain extent, as interested in the strange stories and characters surrounding the stones as the injustice [of their removal] and their fate. Other books argue more strenuously for their return and are more invested in that argument. I’d like readers to come around to my view, but I don’t aim to pressure or overtly persuade.＂ Key for Stallings is the creative world of the Parthenon Marbles, the ways that they appear in nineteenth century poetry and art, and the influence they have exerted in our society: cultural figures 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.