Compson is a fictional family created by American author William Faulkner for use in his novels and short stories. A once prominent family in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, the family began to fall on hard times in the twentieth century. The family name is referred to briefly in the opening chapter of Requiem for a Nun. Principally depicted in The Sound and the Fury and in its appendix, they also make appearances in Absalom, Absalom! and stories such as "That Evening Sun." Faulkner traced their genealogy from 1699 to 1945.
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“A poem is like a person. Though it has a family tree, it is important not because of its ancestors but because of its individuality. The poem, like any human being, is something more than its most complete analysis. Like any human being, it gives a sense of unified individuality which no summary of its qualities can reproduce; and at the same time a sense of variety which is beyond satisfactory final analysis.”
—Donald Stauffer (b. 1930)