University of Virginia Library

To date very little is actually known about the composition of one of William Faulkner's most ambitious poems, "The Lilacs," even though all the known extant experimental manuscript versions contained in the Faulkner Collections at the University of Virginia and in the William Faulkner Collection of Louis Daniel Brodsky have been listed and in a few cases even published or reproduced photographically.[1] The reason for this lack of information has to do in part with the unintegrated nature of the documents.[2] When all the manuscripts are reassembled and transcribed,

they reveal a compositional sequence complete with the exception of most of stanza three and all of stanza four of the first published version of "The Lilacs."[3]

Transcribed below are the seven experimental versions from both repositories ordered in their apparent sequence, followed by a complete printing of the 3-page pencil draft of "The Lilacs." This copy will be collated against the 3-page fair ink copy titled "The Lilacs" that appears on its rectos to suggest its intermediary position between the experimental pencil drafts and the fair ink copy. Finally, the hand-lettered text from the burned booklet titled "The Lilacs"[4] will be printed to show its relative importance in advancing, if not superseding the fair ink copy, toward a more fully realized approximation of the poem which would finally appear in print in the Double Dealer in June, 1925.