At the end of his note to Lines 376-377 of Shade's poem Kinbote (in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962, Shade’s commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) mentions Southey:
Lines 376-377: was said in English Lit to be
This is replaced in the draft by the more significant - and more tuneful - variant:
the Head of our Department deemed
Although it may be taken to refer to the man (whoever he was) who occupied this post at the time Hazel Shade was a student, the reader cannot be blamed for applying it to Paul H., Jr., the fine administrator and inept scholar who since 1957 headed the English Department of Wordsmith College. We met now and then (see Forward and note to line 894) but not often. The Head of the Department to which I belonged was Prof. Nattochdag - "Netochka" as we called the dear man. Certainly the migraines that have lately tormented me to such a degree that I once had to leave in the midst of a concert at which I happened to be sitting beside Paul H., Jr., should not have been a stranger's business. They apparently were, very much so. He kept his eye on me, and immediately upon John Shade's demise circulated a mimeographed letter that began:
Several members of the Department of English are painfully concerned over the fate of a manuscript poem, or parts of a manuscript poem, left by the late John Shade. The manuscript fell into the hands of a person who not only is unqualified for the job of editing it, belonging as he does to another department, but is known to have a deranged mind. One wonders whether some legal action, etc.
"Legal action," of course, might be taken by somebody else too. But no matter; one's just anger is mitigated by the satisfaction of foreknowing that the engagé gentleman will be less worried about the fate of my friend's poem after reading the passage commented here. Southey liked a roasted rat for supper - which is especially comic in view of the rats that devoured his Bishop.
Robert Southey was a Lake Poet. In his Biographia Literaria (1817) S. T. Coleridge (another Lake Poet) says:
The reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution; but by the pleasurable activity of mind excited by the attractions of the journey itself. (Chapter XIV)
It seems that Kinbote's use of "Forward" instead of "Foreword" in this note was inspired by Coleridge's "the reader should be carried forward, etc." At the beginning of the same chapter of Biographia Literaria Coleridge mentions his neighbor, Wordsworth:
During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination. The sudden charm, which accidents of light and shade, which moon-light or sun-set diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combining both. These are the poetry of nature. The thought suggested itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency. For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life; the characters and incidents were to be such, as will be found in every village and its vicinity, where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after them, or to notice them, when they present themselves. (ibid.)
Kinbote's neighbor, Shade lives in the frame house between Goldsworth and Wordsmith. Goldsworth + Wordsmith = Goldsmith + Wordsworth
According to Goldsmith, "life at the greatest and best is but a forward child, that must be humored and coaxed a little till it falls asleep, and then all the care is over."