"Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques"
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There’s a quiet provincial pride in Morgan’s roll call, but also a strategic move: he’s smuggling a whole aesthetic program into a casual-sounding sentence. Name-check Faulkner, Welty, and O’Connor and you’re not just listing Southern canon; you’re invoking a toolbox. Faulkner signals density, moral heat, and a willingness to let syntax buckle under the weight of history. Welty stands for observational precision, local speech, and the almost invisible craft of making a place feel lived-in rather than “regional.” O’Connor brings the hard edge: comedy as a delivery system for violence, grace, and the grotesque.
Morgan’s intent is to justify a certain kind of poetry by anchoring it to widely admired prose. “It would make sense” reads like modesty, but it’s also an argument for continuity: if the South’s most celebrated stories are built from these techniques and values, why should its poems aspire to something else - clean, cosmopolitan, abstracted? The subtext is a defense against a recurring charge that regional writing is narrow or backward. He’s reframing “Southern” as a set of formal strengths: compression, voice, moral pressure, and an intimacy with contradiction.
The context matters: a soldier speaking as a cultural gatekeeper carries a particular authority about “values.” Not political slogans, but lived codes - loyalty, violence, faith, shame - the kinds of forces Southern literature anatomizes without pretending they’re tidy. Morgan’s line is less nostalgia than a bid to keep poetry honest, weathered, and specific.
Morgan’s intent is to justify a certain kind of poetry by anchoring it to widely admired prose. “It would make sense” reads like modesty, but it’s also an argument for continuity: if the South’s most celebrated stories are built from these techniques and values, why should its poems aspire to something else - clean, cosmopolitan, abstracted? The subtext is a defense against a recurring charge that regional writing is narrow or backward. He’s reframing “Southern” as a set of formal strengths: compression, voice, moral pressure, and an intimacy with contradiction.
The context matters: a soldier speaking as a cultural gatekeeper carries a particular authority about “values.” Not political slogans, but lived codes - loyalty, violence, faith, shame - the kinds of forces Southern literature anatomizes without pretending they’re tidy. Morgan’s line is less nostalgia than a bid to keep poetry honest, weathered, and specific.
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| Topic | Poetry |
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