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A. E. Housman and Faulkner's Nobel Prize Speech: a Note

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

James B. Meriwether
Affiliation:
University of South Carolina

Extract

The address which William Faulkner delivered in Stockholm on 10 December 1950, upon being awarded the Nobel Prize, is a challenge to his fellow writers to recall that ‘the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself’ are the true subject of art. The artist who forgets this, Faulkner warned, ‘writes not of love but of lust’ if he does not dedicate himself to ‘the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths’, then his art is ‘ephemeral and doomed’; and the artist himself ‘labors under a curse’.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1971

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References

page 247 note 1 The text I use is that of the final version, which Faulkner apparently prepared shortly after actually delivering the address: Meriwether, James B. (ed.), Essays, Speeches and Public Letters by William Faulkner (New York: Random House, 1966), pp. 119–21.Google Scholar

page 247 note 2 In the essay ‘Verse Old and Nascent: A Pilgrimage’, first published in The Double Dealer, VII (April 1925); reprinted in Collins, Carvel (ed.), William Faulkner: Early Prose and Poetry (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962), pp. 114–18.Google Scholar

page 248 note 1 Quoted from The Collected Poems of A. E. Housman (London: Cape, 1939), pp. 107–8.