The Poetess Laureate of Yoknapatawpha County: Rosa Coldfield and the Power of Convention

Rosa Coldfield—one of the primary narrators of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! —wrote hundreds of poems and published some number of them in Jefferson’s local newspaper during the Civil War. She was, the novel tells us, “the town’s and the county’s poetess laureate.” Yet the fact of the poems themselves has attracted little sustained scholarly attention. What’s more, with one exception, no attention has been paid to the significance of Rosa’s trenchant analysis of her own poetry. This article argues that Rosa’s poetry and her anatomization of its relationship to the War and “its heritage” clarify her understanding – and Faulkner’s – of the work and power of the conventions associated with popular Confederate verse. Drawing on methodologies used by scholars of nineteenth-century American women’s poetry, it situates Rosa’s verse firmly in Confederate print culture and examines not only what we know of Rosa’s poems but also her searing delineation of the work they do in the world of the novel. This reading reveals a key insight: that the very thing many scholars have employed to dismiss Rosa—her poetry—is, in fact, a critical tool that illuminates her as the only character in Absalom, Absalom! who explicitly holds herself accountable for actively maintaining the political, economic, and literary systems of which the novel is so deeply critical.