John Keats

John Keats, the author of the poem quoted in both "Delta Autumn" and Go Down, Moses, was one of the principal figures of the second generation of British Romantics. Unlike the most prominent of his contemporaries, Keats was born of humble origins. He died of tuberculosis at the young age of twenty-five, at which time he had only been a published poet for five years. The poem in "five stanzas" from which (in "Delta Autumn") the father reads (293-94) - or (in Go Down, Moses) McCaslin Edmonds reads (282) - is not named in either of Faulkner's texts, but the two lines both texts quote make it easy to recognize as Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (293-94), one of Faulkner's own favorite poems.