EDNote: Jansy Mello sends this snippet by
James Marcus. It's not intended to re-open this discussion, but rather
as a footnote to the discussion we recently had.
House of Mirth: July 2005
The long poem at the heart of Pale
Fire, Rosenbaum argues, ... The diction of "Pale Fire"
dips into poetic flabbiness with the very second line ("false ...
housemirth.blogspot.com/2005_07_01_housemirth_archive.html
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Next: I share many of
Ron Rosenbaum's enthusiasms. (Three cheers for Charles Portis!) I
admire his smarts and polemical zeal. But he seems to have gone
temporarily off the rails in his latest New York Observer piece, where he begins by disclosing a link between the opening of
Nabokov's Pale Fire and a fairly obscure poem by Robert Frost.
No problem there--especially since the brilliant Brian Boyd has signed
off on this bit of textual sleuthing. It's all downhill from there,
though. The long poem at the heart of Pale Fire, Rosenbaum
argues,
is one of the most underrated
American poems of the past century.... Some have mistakenly called it a
parody; some have shown that it demonstrates the justness of [fictional
poet John] Shade's self-deprecatory characterization of himself as an
'oozy footstep' behind Frost. In fact, taken on its own, it surpasses
in every respect anything that Frost has ever done. Deal with it,
Frostians.
It takes an ear of the purest tin--a
kind of metallurgical wonder--to make these assertions. Nabokov was a
great novelist but a minor poet. The diction of "Pale Fire" dips into
poetic flabbiness with the very second line ("false azure" indeed), and
while there are passages of tremendous beauty and cutting wit, VN just
isn't in the same ballpark as top-drawer Frost. No comparison. Deal
with it, Nabokovians.
James Marcus /New York, NY/HOUSE OF
MIRTH, July 28,2005
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