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Thanks for posting the interview, Matt!
You can certainly tell from Eliot's and Bukowski's poetry
that they must have had very different personalities, but
how much you could say specifically, I don't know. Other
than obvious things such as what they'd read.
But then Shade's poem is autobiographical, "confessional",
as was in style at the time (and probably still), which
helps. And there are conventions for understanding
fictional characters that are probably more reliable than
our methods of understanding real people.
The phrase "given individual" made me suspicious. What is
"given" doing there (aside from providing euphony)? If
it just means "the individual under discussion", it seems
unnecessary and trite. Could it possibly mean an
individual who's literally "given" to the reader by a
writer of fiction?
On a different subject, what are those errors of
natural history that Kinbote makes? Only three come to
my mind: he doesn't recognize the Toothwort White, the
diana, and the atlantis as butterflies. I wonder whether
the goldenrod, blooming at the wrong time of year in the
note to line 347, is another. Maybe Kinbote just
misidentified something. (Yellow sweet clover?)
(I suppose it could count as an error that he doesn't
connect /Bombycilla/ with waxwings until the Index.
And maybe that he never connects cedars and junipers
with waxwings. But these seem trivial.)
Jerry Friedman
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