Although aware that I'm sending too many letters to the list, now that the bit is between the teeth, it's too tempting to strike while the iron is hot. Here's hoping someone, at least, will find these comments not entirely pointless.
 
The quality of PF the poem is absolutely central to a satisfactory understanding of the book. Thinking about it further, I grow more and more certain that VN was deliberately throwing dust into the reader's eyes, in much more than the obviously misleading ways.  
 
In the first place, the idea that Shade is in any way emulating Pope is a smokescreen, a red herring and a wicked misdirection. Pope was a supremely sharp, elegant and polished satirist, who wielded a poetic scalpel. Shade's verse is soggy, if tireless, and the only resemblance to Pope in his lines is that the couplets rhyme, and, often, they do not rhyme smoothly. The poem is immeasurably more reminiscent of the compositions of Wordsworth.
 
I'm not sure whether VN refers to Keats in his various remarks, but Keats's ideas about poetry seem to me more germane here than others.
 
Here is a quote from a website:
 
http://www.wwnorton.com/nrl/english/nael72/Period1Romantic/CourseSessions1/NatureSublime.html
 
'John Keats writes that "A Poet . . . has no Identity — he is continually in for — and filling some other Body" (2.895). In his letters, Keats attacks Wordsworth as a self-aggrandizing "Egotist" (2.890), and he coins the memorable phrase "the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime" (2.894) to describe a poetic sensibility too enamored of itself.'
 
Several list members have recently remarked on the self-centred character of Shade's poem: he is not truly identifying with his unhappy daughter, but considers her ugliness, unpopularity, etc, mainly as his own misfortune, not hers. This transition, from apparently selfless contemplation of beauty or suffering, into "sublime" self-absorption, as the website points out, occurs again and again in Wordsworth's verse.
 
I have to assume that VN was perfectly familiar with this famous passage from Keats, but, to my knowledge, he doesn't refer to it. Nevertheless, it seems to me very apt as commentary on both Shade and Kinbote. The paradox is that Shade is actually a far greater egotist than Kinbote, and in a much more reprehensible way. Kinbote's apparently self-centred fantasies are the airy nothings of a nobody.  He has no real identity, and has negative capability. He is the poet, not Shade.
 
Perhaps someone better versed in VN's works can point out his comments, if any, on Keats.
 
All above assertions automatically imply imho.
 
Charles Harrison-Wallace 
 
 

Search the Nabokv-L archive at UCSB

Contact the Editors

All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.

Visit Zembla

View Nabokv-L Policies