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

Award-winning poet and Oxford Professor of Poetry, A. E. Stallings has gracefully marshaled poetry, personal letters, paintings, a dubiously translated 1801 firman, newspaper clippings, court records, a Greek political campaign, and other lore in this deliciously detailed history of the Parthenon (AKA, Elgin) Marbles. Her narrative encompasses the removal of the marbles from the Athenian Acropolis, their various misadventures before and after installation in the British Museum, and the case for their return to Greece. The true concern of Frieze Frame, however, is the effect the Marbles have had on poets, writers, painters, actors, architects, and so on--that is, their place in art and culture. In the author's own words, "I am, to a certain extent, as interested in the strange stories and characters surrounding the stones as the injustice [of their removal] and their fate. Other books argue more strenuously for their return and are more invested in that argument. I'd like readers to come around to my view, but I don't aim to pressure or overtly persuade." Key for Stallings is the creative world of the Parthenon Marbles, the ways that they appear in nineteenth century poetry and art, and the influence they have exerted in our society: cultural figures in their own right.