Poets, Painters and the Parthenon: the Framing of the Debate over Elgin’s Removal of the Marbles

Delivered by the most outstanding academics in the UK and beyond, the British Academy’s flagship Lecture programme showcases the very best scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. This event is part of the Warton Lectures on English Poetry, first given in 1910.

Lord Byron’s critique of Lord Elgin’s removal of the ruins of the Parthenon Sculptures from Athens in his bestselling poem 'Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage' (1812-18) and Keats’s swooning abstraction over the Marbles newly installed in the British Museum in a famous sonnet 'On Seeing the Elgin Marbles' (1817) represent two poles of the highly controversial and divided debate. Even the popular poet Felicia Hemans contributed to the conversation with her long poem Modern Greece. Keats saw the marbles partly through the eyes of his friend, the 'terrible' painter Benjamin Haydon, while Byron admired Lusieri, an Italian painter and minor master who oversaw Elgin’s projects in Athens. This talk will discuss how poets and painters set the terms of the debate that is still going on to this day.

Speaker: Professor A. E. Stallings, University of Oxford

A. E. Stallings is a US-born poet, translator, and essayist who has lived in Athens since 1999. She has published four volumes of poetry, and a selected poems (This Afterlife, with Carcanet), and three volumes of verse translation, most recently the Pseudo-Homeric Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice (Paul Dry Books). A book, Frieze Frame, on poets, painters, Elgin, and the marbles of the Acropolis is forthcoming with Paul Dry Books. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, US Artists, and MacArthur foundations. She is currently serving as the Oxford Professor of Poetry.

Lead image: Horses from the Parthenon Frieze, Getty.

Body image: Alicia Stallings. Credit to Kostas Mantziaris.