Joseph Trumbull Stickney (June 20, 1874 – October 11, 1904) was an American classical scholar and poet.

Harvard 1852, professor of Latin at Trinity College, Hartford, and his mother was Harriet Champion Trumbull Stickney, of a Connecticut family descended from Gov.

He wrote there two dissertations, a Latin one on the Venetian humanist Ermolao Barbaro, and the other on Les Sentences dans la Poésie Grecque d'Homère à Euripide.

The latter is openly indebted to The Birth of Tragedy and to Stickney's study of the Bhagavad Gita under the tutelage of Sylvain Lévi.

Stickney's poem "Song" (which describes the earth ebullient in late spring, and the cuckoo singing "not yet") is plagiarized in the Robert De Niro 2006 film The Good Shepherd by a Yale professor of English, acted by Michael Gambon as Dr. Fredericks, in a failed attempt to seduce the protagonist, portrayed by Matt Damon.