Querying the Modernist Canon: Historical Consciousness and the Sexuality of Suffering in Faulkner and Hart Crane (William Faulkner) (Critical Essay‪)‬

In his retrospective essay, "Lyricism and Modernism: The Example of Hart Crane," Sherman Paul raises several questions that strike at the problems of Crane's canonizing. The history of modernist criticism to which Paul refers includes the inexplicably troubled reception of Crane's major poem by the very critics who would have been expected to celebrate it. Though Paul does not discuss this group's judgment of other writers, these same figures--the enormously influential men who went on to become known as the New Critics--played a very different role in establishing the positive reputation of another "complicated" modernist. Following the active intervention of figures like Tate and other New Critics, including Cleanth Brooks and John Crowe Ransom, William Faulkner was to become recognized not only as a "tough genius" and a celebrated "poet" of his native region but the paradigmatic American writer of the modern period.