From: Walter Miale <wm@greenworldcenter.org>
Re: Fwd: The Pale Fire poem



It is fascinating to read the discussion about Pale
Fire.

I have a question - is it correct to judge Pale Fire
poem as it is without context of the whole book?


Well why not? If I haven't misunderstood him, Brian Boyd has done this and come to the conclusion that it is a great poem on its own. My own tentative judgment is that the poem is a brilliant tour de force, but that if it is thought of as complete in itself and as the creation of a real person, John Shade, then its elements of parody, irony, and bathos (some of which are enumerated in my post to this list yesterday) appear as aesthetic lapses--or even moral lapses insofar as Shade by his attitude to his daughter's physical being appears to have compounded her suffering and to have played a role of which he was unaware in her tragedy.

I know she was no longer alive when her father wrote the poem, but can Hazel's shade have been happy at his putting on display to the world her "swollen feet" and "psoriatic fingernails"?

And by the way, there's this bit of parody, or self-parody:

        I loathe such things as jazz...

To say that the experience of the poem is immensely enriched by the preface and commentary is, I think, an understatement, but surely all will agree that it is so enriched. As you say, "all the parts are so well balanced," and "the poem works perfectly in the novel."

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