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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