Nabokov clearly saw nothing wrong with mentioning
something of cardinal importance to him in a poem that uses a strained rhyme
associated with "comic and curious verse". I'm suggesting that he intended
no misjudgement or inartistry on Shade's part when he made Shade do the same
thing.
He also mentions:
the apparatus criticus to the Dunciad, which I didn't
know about and am sure is more important to /Pale Fire/ than Frost's /New
Hampshire/ is.
Matthew appears to have accepted, at least in part, my distinction
between poetry and verse, and considers the Index quatrain to
be verse, but I've failed to persuade Jerry, it seems. No matter.
Searching for more on The Dunciad, via Google, I came across this
site:
Besides containing a large slab of The Dunciad, Book 4, which demonstrates
how utterly un-Pope-like are the limping feet of John Shade, and
compared with which PF, the "poem", could hardly be described as
inartistic, let alone merely competent, the site also contains
a cornucopia of wordplay of such staggering, mind-blowing ingenuity as
to bankrupt credulity.
Is Richard Brodie a computer? Has anyone come across him before? The
several pages in his name are so fantastically clever that I'm stunned.
Gob-smacked, as they say in England. I wonder if he's turned his attention to
Vladimir Nabokov. Reading just a few of Brodie's compositions has left me with a
sort of dead, burnt-out feeling. An eat-your-heart-out sensation
situation.
Charles