Anthony Stadlen [ to JM's "On my part I entertained conjectures about HH's emphasis on "mortal morality" ( 'The moral sense in mortals is the duty/We have to pay on mortal sense of beauty.'), and to what kind of human or heavenly Judges he might be addressing while he is trying to save 'not his head but his soul'."] : "It is perhaps worth emphasizing that, as confirmed by Alfred Appel in The Annotated "Lolita", the "old poet" is "invented", i.e. none other than Nabokov himself, whom Humbert quotes:

JM: I had concluded rather hastily that the "old poet" was Humbert Humbert, Nabokov's character. Anthony Stadlen correctly warned, in not so many words, that Humbert Humbert is quoting Nabokov himself.

This observation makes quite a difference although this quote remains as something that HH chose to add to his transient self-evaluation. This is why I still believe that "the inclusion of the 'old poet's' verses are at odds with what Humbert Humbert has written just before them It's almost as if his bout of sanity had been blown away right then."

There two or three other poems which Humbert Humbert admits havind penned ( the Ash Wednesday parody, the squirl/quirrel carrollian rhymes, his conclamation about the whereabout of Dolores Haze are the ones that came to my mind now).

IN conclusion, unlike Kinbote, who thought of himself as a poor rhymester, Humbert dares to write verse. Why, then, did he quote Nabokov at this exact moment and loose his frail grip on his mind and..."soul"? If his notes will grant a shared immortality to Lolita and to him, and then Art ceases to be felt as a "mere palliative" to his mortal pain ( "one wanted H.H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.") what has effected this transmutation?

The only conjecture I can formulate now is that HH, by quoting the author Vladimir Nabokov, demonstrates (but does he recognize it?) that he is under his creator's maddening grip.

One of the consequences of this line of reasoning is very strage. It implies that Vladimir Nabokov is, himself, Humbert Humbert's fiend Quilty.(no wonder his alibis in the crypto,.I mean, cryprogrammic paper chase include wordgames and butterflies...). Strange.

Of course, this is still a rather flimsy conclusion (it's based only in the little twist that moves HH from an incipient moment of sanity into his recurrent madnes)

A second point may be something that I realized just now but it's also very frail. It relies on Humbert Humbert referring to himself as "One" ( in "one wanted HH to exist..so as to have him make you live...") .If "One" were Nabokov and "you" isn't Quilty, but Humbert - then, whereas Humbert is only able to reach "art as a palliative" (by his very mortal sense of beauty ), Vladimir Nabokov can claim the ancient aurochs and angels (I am thinking=Nabokov is thinking) and vindicate immortality and Lolita for himself.