A Green Bough (1933)

Summary

William Gorman. “William Faulkner, Poet.” New York Sun, April 21, 1933, p. 25.

William Faulkner's new volume of poems is immediately notable for the number of experiments in imitation which it contains. Mr. Faulkner once confessed to an inquiring reporter: “Ah write when the spirit moves me, and the spirit moves me every day.” It is now evident that he also reads a good deal, that he enjoys trying other people's forms.

In the first of his forty-four poems, Mr. Faulkner treats of a drawing room full of “All the Dead Pilots” in a strict “Prufrock” and “Portrait of a Lady” idiom. In the third poem he yields to the thrill of hallucination and he gets it with Hart Crane's means–a dazzling eruption of metaphors on a blank verse norm. In poem IV he writes a complete E. E. Cummings poem and throughout the volume he works in a few patented tricks (even Mr. Cummings's favorite prefix Un-). Almost any given student given the anonymous poems XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV, would spot them as the work of A. E. Housman. This list of immediately apparent resemblances could be extended a little further.

One is not disparaging the particular poems in pointing out Mr. Faulkner's eclecticism. The poems are consistently able. But the author's eclecticism will come as a surprise to those who have been thinking of him as the powerful “original” from Mississippi. Evidently Mr. Faulkner is far less the slave to his corrosive vision of Southern Evil than the comparative consistency of his novels would indicate. In his own a little fatuously hard-boiled way, Mr. Faulkner admitted in the Modern Library Preface to his Sanctuary that he was something of a litterateur.