Gary Lipon:..."Pale Fire, the poem is an ironic piece, but the feelings of pathos and tragedy bleed through the irony...To me this  remarkable feel for rhythm within the confines of the heroic couplet, distinguishes Shade/Nabokov as great poet: a fine sense of rhythm that is used to lead into, set up, and close, the short episodes... humor is reinforced by the extra emphasis imparted by the spondaic rhythm of the last three words...But the very act of writing a thousand line narrative poem in an age old form is daring. Shade/VN risks a lot on that ground alone, and it's to be expected that many modern readers should find PF, the poem, ineffectual by reason of antique form alone,a quaint anachronism...there is a balancing going on through out all of Pale Fire, the poem, between irony and parody on one side and pathos and authentic emotion on the other...
John Morris: "Opinions understandably differ about whether Shade is a lousy poet, but it seems clear to me that VN did not present him as such...Furthermore, the fact that he offered long excerpts from the poem at public readings, to which his audience responded with evident and unironic enjoyment, also argues for VN's faith in the poem's merits... See my article "Genius and Plausibility: Suspension of Disbelief in Pale Fire" on the Zembla website."

A.Bouazza: I like to think that, as has been pointed out before, the feel of steel the word evokes (cold and hard) may have been decisive for VN; furthermore, on a cold night a stang will sting the hand more...PF contains a striking amount of dialect words, chiefly Scottish ones. The line preceding the one containing the word in quiestion has "Lochanhead", lochan is a diminutive of the Scottish loch, and lochan means pond. There is a defamiliarization at play here on a verbal level similar to the existential one experienced by Hazel.

 

 

JM: Gary Lipon's description of John Shade's achievements touched a chord in my heart  for the first time. Until then I was mainly annoyed at the self-centered, provincial poet, jumping straight from New Wye onto the whirling stars, with no Haiti or Afghanistan lying in between because I'd been considering Shade following Kinbote's point of view, only - and he was such an ambivalent, idealizingly unfair admirer...

I still don't consider Shade to be a great poet, not even in fiction ("the greatest", according to VN), but the debate has lighted a fresh path for me. A.Bouazza's comments on "stang" describing its effect of "defamiliarization...on a verbal level similar to the existential one experienced by Hazel,"expresses much about the novel as a whole, its shifting perspectives and the habitual alternation btw parody and pathos.