Dear Jerry,

Many thanks for your tolerant response. I notice there is an eminent academic called Gerald M.Friedman --- are you he? It was thoughtless of me to suppose the M stood for Emerald --- but I'm surprised to learn that Jerry actually is short for Gerald.

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.

VN must naturally have been totally familiar with Frost's rather gnomic essay, which prefaces his Collected Poems. It now seems to me to be an essential backdrop to the entire thrust of Pale Fire. Yeats also has a poem on the scholar/artist conflic.

Would a debate along these lines not be more profitable than trying to "solve" the book?

Charles

In a message dated 27/10/2006 16:18:19 GMT Standard Time, NABOKV-L@HOLYCROSS.EDU writes:

Dear Charles (that should be safe),

I apologize for getting your name wrong. I don't know how I
did that.

My real first name is Gerald, incidentally. And that's as
far as I go in resemblances to Kinbote's Gerald.

I can't agree with you that proceeding along the lines of
scholarly inquiry is doomed. The novel was not written the
way Frost says poets pick up knowledge like burs--it was
certainly carefully planned.

(I also think that some of the poem is good poetry, though
none of it is as good as Frost's best.)

Jerry Friedman