Frieze Frame: How Poets, Painters, and Their Friends Framed the Debate Around Elgin and the Marbles of the Parthenon

"Frieze Frame is a lucidly brilliant, learned read that wears its learning lightly, inviting the reader into a coterie of artists and intellectuals, traced and uncovered with a poet's touch."
—Times Literary Supplement

"Highly entertaining."
—The Spectator

“[A] compact, original book. . . . Whether they are shown in London or Athens, the Marbles will always be one of history’s singular Rorschach tests. Keats saw beauty; Byron saw tragedy; in Frieze Frame, readers may see some version of themselves.” 
—Wall Street Journal

In this deliciously detailed and gossipy history of the Parthenon (AKA, Elgin) Marbles, award-winning poet and writer A. E. Stallings discusses the removal of the Marbles from the Athenian Acropolis, their misadventures before and after installation in the British Museum (from shipwreck to boxing matches), and the debate over their future and possible reunion in Greece.

Bringing fresh air to a stale debate, Frieze Frame explores the effect the Marbles have had on poets, writers, painters, actors, architects, and vice versa—how poets and painters, for instance, have framed the Marbles' place in art and culture. The poets Keats, Byron, and Cavafy, as well as an aristocrat who loses his nose and his fortune, a bad painter who commits suicide, and a general who takes his cat into battle, are among the cast of characters. In the author’s own words, “I am, to a certain extent, as interested in the strange stories and people surrounding the stones as the controversy [of their removal] and their fate.” Key for Stallings is the creative world of the Marbles, the ways that they appear in nineteenth (and twentieth) century writing and art, race theory and beyond, and the influence they have exerted in our society: cultural figures, maybe even characters, 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 a selected poems, This Afterlife (2022). Her verse translations include Lucretius's The Nature of Things and Hesiod's Works and Days, both with Penguin Classics, and a translation of the pseudo-Homeric The 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.