-------- Original Message --------
Dear Charles,
(an aside: I don't know why the number of postings fell these last days
so much)
- dear Charles -
I must confess, I think your demands concerning the poetic quality
of the PF (the poem) seem to me a bit too dogmatic. While I agree
that the question how high is its quality is important, I do not
see why the dependency should be "linear" (higher the quality - better
for the whole novel - and for VN; from your postings I had
the impression that this is your firm belief).
You even echo the words of Kinbote (with conscious irony, I am sure):
>you will appreciate it more
> while expecting not so much.
when you compare the poem by Erasmus Darwin with it.
The aim of this posting is not to discuss the poetic quality of the PF,
but to ask, what other
works containing important parts written in verse and in prose we could
compare with PF? And how the quality of verse part (seen as poetry)
influenced the quality of the whole?
First things that come me to mind: Kubla Khan by Coleridge; Zhivago by
Pasternak ;
many medieval Chinese and Japanese novels.
In “Kubla Khan” the quality of poetry is very high, but to some extent
it is “validated” by prosaic note – alone it would look strange and
fragmentary, and the role of the note is functionally subdued to the
poetry – it defines a genre, and adds some “common sense sanity”
to “divine folly”.
In Zhivago the quality of poetry is also very high, but the connection
is
lousy; to the quality of the whole it gives very little - it is my
personal opinion, but I think that in “Zhivago” the dialogues are
awful, the characters are very schematic and, moreover, “squeezed”
into the schemes by the author, the composition is lousy and text is
very
fine only when Pasternak speaks “by himself” (the descriptions of
Nature and philosophical discourse are very beautiful). In medieval
Chinese and Japanese novels I can judge the quality of poetry only by
translations, but usually there are small poetic fragments that look
very
fine in the text; do some of these poems be considered as high quality
poetry as such?
To the list: what other examples of “mixed” text (poetry/verse/prose)
can we consider? Does in these examples higher quality of poetry improve
the quality of the whole? (I think, in general the connection is not
straightforward.)
To Charles:
>Note, for instance, the skilful balance with which
> Erasmus weaves a particularly apt mot juste into the structure of
his
Ø work --- no
What word do you speak of ?