John Talbot

Biography

John Talbot is a poet and scholar (specializing in the relationship of Ancient Greek and Latin to English literature). He took his doctorate in Classics at Boston University.

His third book, a study of Greek lyric meters in English poetry, is under contract from the Bloomsbury (London). His second book, a volume of poems called Rough Translation, is published in autumn 2012. His first book is a volume of poems, The Well-Tempered Tantrum.

His most recent project has been to contribute two chapters to The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (Oxford University Press, 5 vols) — the first, a study of nineteenth-century English translation from the classics; the second, a diptych contrasting W. H. Auden’s reception of Greek and Latin with Robert Lowell’s.

He is currently at work on a chapter on English poets’ uses of classical metre for The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Latin Metre, and is compiling a third volume of poems.

His articles on ancient languages and English literature have appeared in such venues as Classical Journal, Classical and Modern Literature, Studies in Philology, Essays in Criticism, Arion, Translation and Literature, and the International Journal of the Classical Tradition.

His literary criticism has appeared in The Yale Review, The Weekly Standard, and (frequently) in The New Criterion.

He has lately contributed chapters to the volumes Ted Hughes and the Classics (Oxford University Press, 2009), Perceptions of Horace: A Poet and his Readers (Cambridge University Press, 2009), and The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English (Oxford University Press, 2006). His verse translation from the Greek appears in the Norton anthology The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present (Norton, 2009).

He regularly publishes poems in such journals as <em>Poetry, The Yale Review, The American Scholar, The Iowa Review, The Southern Review, The New Criterion, Arion, Southwest Review, Quarterly West, Agenda, Atlanta Review, Literary Imagination, and others both in the US and Britain.

He has served as a referee for Oxford University Press and for such journals as Classical and Modern Literature, The International Journal of the Classical Tradition, and Translantion & Literature.  He has sat on the national council of the Association of Literary Critics, Scholars, and Writers. He has been director and associate director of programs in London and Siena, Italy.  

Degrees

PhD (Ancient Greek and Latin), Boston University.

Interests

Classical/English literary relations, literary translation, poetic meter, writing poetry Classical Tradition, Poetry