Subject
Pale Fire poem (quality of)
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Dear Charles and all,
By your standards Shakespeare's sonnets would not be poetry either,
since some of those have very much been worried into being (take sonnet
104, for instance). You might try broadening your tastes.
Brian Boyd
>I was mainly hoping to provoke a discussion on whether Pale Fire, the
poem,
can truly be accepted as "poetry". I would call it highly-crafted verse,
but
verse isn't poetry. Johnson, of course, said that if Pope's verse isn't
poetry, where is poetry to be found. But there were clearly many who
didn't think
what Pope wrote was poetry. Craft, no matter how impressive, or how
skilled,
is not art. In the final analysis.
In his essay Frost also remarked that "A poem may be worked over once it
is
in being, but it may not be worried into being."
My impression is that Shade "worried" his composition into being. As
Kinbote
somewhere says, John Shade could never quite make his snowflakes fall
like
Frost.
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By your standards Shakespeare's sonnets would not be poetry either,
since some of those have very much been worried into being (take sonnet
104, for instance). You might try broadening your tastes.
Brian Boyd
>I was mainly hoping to provoke a discussion on whether Pale Fire, the
poem,
can truly be accepted as "poetry". I would call it highly-crafted verse,
but
verse isn't poetry. Johnson, of course, said that if Pope's verse isn't
poetry, where is poetry to be found. But there were clearly many who
didn't think
what Pope wrote was poetry. Craft, no matter how impressive, or how
skilled,
is not art. In the final analysis.
In his essay Frost also remarked that "A poem may be worked over once it
is
in being, but it may not be worried into being."
My impression is that Shade "worried" his composition into being. As
Kinbote
somewhere says, John Shade could never quite make his snowflakes fall
like
Frost.
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