The Marble Faun and A Green Bough

Book excerpt: Published early in the author’s legendary career and collected here in a single illuminating volume, these are William Faulkner’s only two works of poetry: The Marble Faun (1924) and A Green Bough (1933). “These are primarily the poems of youth and a simple heart. They are the poems of a mind that reacts directly to sunlight and trees and skies and blue hills, reacts without evasion or self-consciousness. They are drenched in sunlight and color as is the land in which they were written, the land which gave birth and sustenance to their author. He has roots in this soil as surely and inevitably as has a tree. . . . The author of these poems is a man steeped in the soil of his native land, a Southerner by every instinct, and, more than that, a Mississippian. George Moor sad that all universal art became great by first being provincial, and the sunlight and mocking-birds and blue hills of North Mississippi are a part of this young man’s very being.”—from the preface to The Marble Faun, by Phil Stone