Subject
Verse and Poems
From
Date
Body
The long thread on the distinction between verse and poetry has been enlightening. I had always thought that verse was to poetry as prose is to short story. I'm not sure if anyone has already quoted from VN's introduction to Poems and Problems, where he says:
"The Russian poems represent only a small fraction--hardly more than one percent--of the steady mass of verse which I began to exude in my early youth, more than half a century ago, and continued to do so, with monstrous regularity, especially during the twenties and thirties, then petering out in next two decades, when a meager output of a score or so hardly exceeded the number of poems I wrote in English."
Yet while referring to the early work as "verse" he does not seem to be denigrating it.
"There is not much to say about the section of fourteen English poems, all written in America and all published in The New Yorker. Somehow, they are of a lighter texture than the Russian stuff..."
_________________________________________________________________
Search from any Web page with powerful protection. Get the FREE Windows Live Toolbar Today!
http://get.live.com/toolbar/overview
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
"The Russian poems represent only a small fraction--hardly more than one percent--of the steady mass of verse which I began to exude in my early youth, more than half a century ago, and continued to do so, with monstrous regularity, especially during the twenties and thirties, then petering out in next two decades, when a meager output of a score or so hardly exceeded the number of poems I wrote in English."
Yet while referring to the early work as "verse" he does not seem to be denigrating it.
"There is not much to say about the section of fourteen English poems, all written in America and all published in The New Yorker. Somehow, they are of a lighter texture than the Russian stuff..."
_________________________________________________________________
Search from any Web page with powerful protection. Get the FREE Windows Live Toolbar Today!
http://get.live.com/toolbar/overview
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm