I see some consensus emerging! Perhaps the phrase juste is “uneasy consensus?” I accept BB’s (et al’s) evidence that some perfectly normal folk have been genuinely moved to tears or near-tears by Hazel’s death as related by Shade in PF-the-poem. We all know that no real lives were lost (and no real ice broken!) in the making of the Cantos (to paraphrase those movie caveats), yet the unexplainable fact is that we respond to tragic fiction via our imaginations and emotions, rather than formally analyzing the prosody or questioning the poet’s intentions. Kindertotenlieder are ancient refrains: every parent’s worst fear to outlive their children.
My opinions on VN/Shade-as-poet have been somewhat swanged (Carrollian blend of sway/change) during the recent exchanges. Most significant was Dmitri’s [first-name terms granted, pace the TOoL preface?] positive assertion, from the master’s voice, no less, that his father intended us to treat Shade as serious a poet as VN-the-poet. That still leaves many teasing questions for debate, but I can no longer assume that any lines I consider sub-pa [sic] can be excused (aliter, praised!) as deliberate irony/parody.
Previously argued: how great a poet was VN? Most polls put VN in the “top ten novelists” (make that top-five in my list), but has VN ever been placed in a poet’s top-N list, for any value of N? Or among top-lepidopterists, top-chess-problemists, top-crossword-setters, top-philosophers, top-physicists, top-mathematicians? Of course, if you add “novelist” to the above categories, the fields shrink at once. VN might well be Number One novelist-lepidopterist, Number One novelist-chess-problemist and so on. But as novelist-poet? That’s a tougher call.
Rating and ranking artists continues to be annoyingly presumptuous, yet undeniably, irresistible fun. I was amused to learn that Pepys found Romeo & Juliet the very worst play he had ever encountered, but changed his mind later. That was when he encountered Midsummer Night’s Lost! We naturally ask if Pepys was “qualified” to pass such daft assessments, but we assume (wrongly as it happens) that Shakespeare was always undisputed top-of-the-charts beyond rational dispute. Not widely known (outside this list!) is that Pope’s 1725 edition of Shakespeare’s plays demoted 1,560 of the Bard’s lines as “excessively bad.” He changed “take arms against a SEA of trouble” to “a SIEGE of troubles” to fix an obviously mixed-up metaphor! (Johnson was also bothered, and suggested “an ASSAIL of troubles.”). Hobbes and Dryden, via the Royal Society, led a fierce campaign against the “very style and expression of Shakespeare,” witness this manifesto from the Society 1667:
We glory in the plain Style, not in all these seeming Mysteries, upon which writers look so big ... this vicious abundance of phrase, this trick of Metaphors, which makes so great a noise in the World. We would have Reason set out in plain undeceiving expressions.
One might wildly surmise some future Pope seeking revenge on Shade/VN by “correcting” the excessively-bad bits of the PF-cantos?
Stan Kelly-Bootle
Member AMS, MAA, AAAS
On 26/01/2010 10:57, "jansymello" <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:
PS [to The ellaboration about the artist...developped by ... in which the confusion of intoxication is rendered by words ...And double tapers on the table dance...] I must have been carried away by verbal vapours while spelling.
Sorry (although "repeteating"in another posting was almost amusing).
J.Twiggs:"A passage that you and I seem to agree is less than first rate is the one that Gary Lipon quoted a few days ago and that Jansy mentions this morning as smacking of Rupert Brooke....to me the passage is good and bad in about the same way a Norman Rockwell painting is both good and bad...it would be right at home on a Hallmark card. It all but oozes sincerity, doesn't it?" ..." the novel is much more radical (more Nabokovian, you might say) than it would be if Shade were the rock that many readers take him to be..."
JM: I wasn't judging the qualities of the lines but, at that moment, the spark of sincerity in that most provincial of poets. However, Shade is neither rock nor rockwell ( btw: how did VN's comparison bt. Dali and Rockwell go?)
I think it was Jerry Friedman who questioned "oozy footstep" as a cruel assessment of Robert Frost by Shade/VN. I wonder if it was intentional (the ooze was needed to build up towards Hazel's swamp, as an image of dark greasy snow...)