Biography
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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 Greek and Latin at Boston University.
He is the author of the following books: The Alcaic Metre in the English Imagination (2022), Rough Translation (2012), and The Well-Tempered Tantrum (2004), and, with Victoria Moul, C. H. Sisson Reconsidered (2023). He is currently at work on a fifth book, How Has Love Gone Dogma?
He has lately contributed 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 literature with Robert Lowell's. He has also contributed chapters to The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English (Oxford University Press, 5 vols), Ted Hughes and the Classics (Oxford University Press), and Perceptions of Horace: A Poet and His Readers (Cambridge University Press).
He has chapters forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Latin Metre in English (on English adaptations of Latin meter) and on Robert Lowell and the classics for Robert Lowell in Context (Cambridge University Press).
His writing on ancient languages and English literature has appeared in such venues as Classical Journal, Studies in Philology, Classical and Modern Literature, Essays in Criticism, Arion, Translation and Literature, P. N. Review, and The International Journal of the Classical Tradition.
His literary criticism has appeared in The New Criterion, The Yale Review, and The Weekly Standard.
His poems and verse translations appear in such journals as Poetry, The Yale Review, The American Scholar, The Iowa Review, The New Criterion, The Southern Review, Arion, Southwest Review, Agenda, Atlanta Review, Literary Imagination, and others both in the US and the UK. His poems have appeared in anthologies from Yale University Press, W. W. Norton, and Waywiser Press.
He has served as a peer referee for several academic presses and journals, including Oxford University Press, Northwestern University Press, Classical Journal, and the International Journal of the Classical Tradition.
He has served as director and associate director of several academic 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