SOURCE: “Tryst Beyond Time: Faulkner's Emily and Keats,” in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 28, No. 2, Spring, 1991, pp. 203–13.

In the following essay, Birk finds similarities between “A Rose for Emily” and John Keats's “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”

Over the last two decades, critics have shown Keats's influence on the work of William Faulkner. In 1968 Cleanth Brooks pointed out that Faulkner commenced his career in letters by considering himself a poet and later even went so far as to label himself a “failed poet.” According to Brooks, Faulkner's poetry bears the influence of Keats, Verlaine, and T. S. Eliot (5–6). In 1972 J. F. Kobler showed similarities between Faulkner's Lena Grove and Keats's Grecian urn, especially in terms of the shared attribute of endurance (339). The following year William B. Stone argued a connection between “The Bear” and the famous ode, with the poem functioning as a “kind of ‘objective correlative’” to...