Now that I’ve read
through Edsel’s A Thicket of Sky,
1961, I must revise my opinion of
his verse. It was by unfortunate accident that my first impression was formed by
………. bound to a solemn
task
Which wasn’t
interrupted even to ask
The
time.
This is perhaps the
lamest passage in his output, and the general level of the oeuvre is really not
bad at all. Imho. The poems are generally well-finished, carefully composed,
pleasant and endearing in a gentle way. If one wanted to be unkind, one might
call their overall character rather Reader’s Digest,
perhaps.
They are very
definitely sub-Frost, rural, folksy; but without Frost’s incisiveness, eg “Good
fences make good neighbours”, which, imho, is the kind of hard line that lifts
Frost above the ordinary. It is interesting that in high-school Ford claimed
Shakespeare, Longfellow, Millay as his favourite poets (Wikipedia). Frost may
have been a later unacknowledged influence.
The willow bough and
the twisted stump, recalling Shade’s description of himself, come from The Return to Sunday Creek, which was
published in 1956, in a collection of the same name. It seems to me quite possible that VN
had read this collection, as the date coincides quite well. The Image of Desire and Whatever Voice, which Matthew quoted,
may have appeared in a collection called The Image of Desire, which I haven’t got
a date for, but which would have appeared pre-1961. So, if VN knew these poems,
he could have seen them in a published collection, before writing Pale Fire, and
not necessarily in a journal.
The feeling one gets,
however, is that on the whole these are poems written for the sake of writing
poems, as Andrew Brown indicated. As an undergraduate I went through a phase of
writing one or two sonnets every week. After a couple of years, on looking
through them, I threw over 50 of them away in a frenzy of self-criticism,
deciding that they were simply academic exercises. I didn’t think they were bad,
but just not up to the level I aspired to.
I feel the same about
Shade’s poem: a verse narrative written, ultimately, for the sake of writing a
narrative in verse. It is the
commentary which adds the special, zesty element of genius, giving the book its
unique and permanent standing as a work of art. Regarding the work as an
exceptionally stimulating critical disquisition on the mystery of excellence in
literary performance seems to me the most rewarding way of approaching it. It is
also very, very funny. The first time I read it, I found myself repeatedly
laughing aloud.