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Biography
American

Trumbull Stickney

1874 — 1904

American poet who became the first American to receive the Doctorat ès Lettres from the Sorbonne. Stickney's small body of work — published in a single collection, Dramatic Verses (1902), and supplemented by posthumous gatherings — has been championed by critics as among the finest American poetry of its era, anticipating the imagist and modernist movements. He died of a brain tumour at thirty, leaving a reputation as one of American poetry's most tantalising what-ifs.

Past sales0
PeriodVictorian & Gilded Age
NationalityAmerican
1. Biography

A short life of the author

Joseph Trumbull Stickney (1874–1904) was an American poet born in Geneva, Switzerland, to American parents. He was educated at Harvard and the Sorbonne, where he became the first American to earn the Doctorat ès Lettres — a distinction that speaks to his formidable classical and literary learning.

His single published collection, Dramatic Verses (1902), contains poems of startling compression and sensory precision that anticipate the imagist revolution of a decade later. His best-known poem, “Mnemosyne,” begins: “It’s autumn in the country I remember.”

Stickney died of a brain tumour in 1904 at age thirty. His friends William Vaughn Moody and George Cabot Lodge edited a posthumous collection, The Poems of Trumbull Stickney (1905), which secured his reputation among a small but devoted readership.

Collecting Stickney

Dramatic Verses (1902) and The Poems of Trumbull Stickney (1905) are rare and collected by specialists in American poetry and pre-modernist verse. First editions bring $200–$600. The Amherst Writers & Artists reissue expanded access but did not diminish demand for originals.