Background
Joseph Stickney was born on June 20, 1874, in Geneva, Switzerland and spent much of his early life in Europe. He was the son of Austin and Harriet Champion (Trumbull) Stickney.
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, United States
Joseph attended Harvard University from 1891 to 1895, receiving a Bachelor of Arts magna cum laude.
Sorbonne University, Paris 75005, France
Joseph studied for seven years in Paris, taking a doctorate at the Sorbonne.
United States
Joseph Trumbull Stickney
Joseph Stickney was born on June 20, 1874, in Geneva, Switzerland and spent much of his early life in Europe. He was the son of Austin and Harriet Champion (Trumbull) Stickney.
Joseph attended Harvard University from 1891 to 1895, receiving a Bachelor of Arts 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 d'Homère à Euripide.
While studying at Harvard, Stickney was the first freshman to be elected to the editorial board at the Hansard Monthly. Though he published his verses in various college journals, his social circle was centered at the Monthly. There, he met George Cabot Lodge and William Vaughn Moody. Much of Stickney’s undergraduate poetry was published in the pages of the Monthly, as well as some criticism of his beloved Greek literature.
Throughout his career, Stickney seems to have felt torn between his academic and literary passions. While in school, Stickney struggled to reconcile his divided interests. While hacking away at the profession he had resigned himself to pursue, he continued to write poetry, notably his long poem “Kalypso.”
Many of Stickney's poems relate to an affair he may have had between 1896 and 1899. As the lines from poems of that period suggest, Stickney became focused on the despair of love. By the time the affair ended in 1899, however, Stickney had composed much of his first volume of poetry - but he was unable to find a publisher for it. By 1902, he located a publisher for his verses - Charles E. Goodspeed in Boston. The volume, Dramatic Verses, published in 1902, includes many of Slickney's poems from his Paris days, as well as some work written earlier. One year later, Stickney graduated from the Sorbonne, thus becoming the first American to win the prestigious Doctorat es Lettres there. He took a brief tour of Greece before returning to an academic post at Harvard.
His life as an instructor proved as unfulfilling as his life as a student, however. Not only was Stickney unhappy in his work, but he also began to experience terrible headaches as well as periodic “blind spells.“ He continued to teach and write, but on October 11, 1904 he died of a brain tumor. Like some other poets who have died young, Stickney produced some of his best works in the months leading up to his death. Like many poets who died young, too, Stickney found his greatest fame after death. His friends Lodge and Moony soon published an edition of his collected poetry, in which critics recognized a “romantic and wistful temper." Later readers of Stickney’s poetry similarly found his work intriguing. Stickney was praised by such notables as Conrad Aiken, William Rose Benet, Louis Untermeyer, Allen Tate, Mark Van Doren, W. H. Auden, Oscar Williams, and John Hollander.