Thanks, AB. Sounds like my kinda collection. Order toot sweet. Yes: VN wrote the words to both these poems, and the PF-cantos. The open question is whether we judge them differently (and how!): VN the up-front poet compared with VN the novelist-poet, the inventor of fictional poets (weak, strong, comical). Great poets write great poems. Great fictional poets write great fictional poems (i.e., poems serving extra-poetical fictional agendums.)
Grateful for the inputs from you, DN, JT, the 2 JMs, et al. New facts being ingested that ARE modifying my opinions. (Jan 22, 2010 will go down in history as SKB-Mind-Changed-by-Email Day).
We don’t seem to have the same problem with Lewis Caroll and the Alice-embedded Jabberwocky and Walrus & Carpenter ditties. (We can exclude Humpty Dumpty as ‘author’ since Jabberwocky had appeared earlier as a stand-alone, mock Anglo-Saxon [!] poem, signed LC.) Had the Tweedle-D’s been cast as promising schoolboy poets, we might well be debating certain flaws in their recitation as brilliant, deliberate clues planted by LC to mark the boys’ immaturity?
Finally, for now, we have all those novels about novelists writing novels about novelists ... At any level of nested inter-novelizing, can we ever find the fictional novelist OUT-PERFORMING the onlie-begetter, the one who collects the royalty cheques (if any).
Quick SIGHTING, or rather audio-book HEARING: Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (highly recommended as one of the few non-VN novels I’ve enjoyed for many a year): she has a character using PALE FIRES to describe the ladies who fail to win Henry VIII’s attention. Lucky escape, nein?
Without the text at hand to confirm, the term comes over as a FAMLIAR IDIOM of those times (pre-dating Shakespeare, of course, so possibly an anachronism?)
SKB
On 21/01/2010 19:00, "A. Bouazza" <mushtary@YAHOO.COM> wrote:
Stan Kelly-Bootle: Have the Lolilta poetic ‘lollipops’ (to borrow the musical idiom) ever been published and analzed as part of VN’s corpus?
American Poetry: The Twentieth Century, Volume Two: E.E. Cummings to May Swenson, published by The Library of America (NY 2000) contains two poems, the second being On Translating "Eugene Onegin" and the first from Lolita "Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze," on page 263. Humbert Humbert is not identified as the poet.
A. Bouazza.