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Re: Monroe, merits of Shade's poem
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Both Jerry and Matthew Roth lambast Monroe's essay. One says it contains so
much bunk, and the other says it makes him mad.
While I would say it is not at all as well written as the Morris essay, it
does draw attention to certain features of Shade's composition which I find
bathetic, and for that reason I am, to an extent, in agreement with Monroe.
Take the passage from lines, say, 488 to 500.
where zesty skaters crossed/From Exe to Wye on days of special frost.
This appears to contain a totally out-of-context trivial joke --- X to Y.
"Zesty" and "special" are imprecise adjectives lacking in register and tone,
apparently introduced in order to lengthen the lines into decasyllables. There
is a constant conflict in English verse between the octosyllabic and the
decasyllabic line. Inferior decasyllables can be recognized by striking out the
adjectival space-fillers.
where skaters crossed/From Exe to Wye on days of frost.
"Exe to Wye" is still aesthetically offensive. The struggle to find rhymes
is obtrusive and disconcerting almost throughout the passage:
might have lost her way/ ... and some say
I know. You know./It was a night of thaw, a night of blow.
Black spring/Stood just around the corner, shivering
A night of blow??? This simply is not skilful or convincing verse, let alone
poetry. Genuinely great English poetry succeeds in employing rhyme without
drawing attention to its rhymes, in spite of the difficulty of incorporating
rhymed verse-forms, which is inherent in the language. Even Keats,
notoriously, falters now and then. But only now and then.
A matter of taste, in the end. My taste is not broad enough to accommodate
Pale Fire into the canon of great poetry. Shade, imho, would have done better
to follow Wordsworth's, or even Shakespeare's, blank verse more closely.
Charles
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much bunk, and the other says it makes him mad.
While I would say it is not at all as well written as the Morris essay, it
does draw attention to certain features of Shade's composition which I find
bathetic, and for that reason I am, to an extent, in agreement with Monroe.
Take the passage from lines, say, 488 to 500.
where zesty skaters crossed/From Exe to Wye on days of special frost.
This appears to contain a totally out-of-context trivial joke --- X to Y.
"Zesty" and "special" are imprecise adjectives lacking in register and tone,
apparently introduced in order to lengthen the lines into decasyllables. There
is a constant conflict in English verse between the octosyllabic and the
decasyllabic line. Inferior decasyllables can be recognized by striking out the
adjectival space-fillers.
where skaters crossed/From Exe to Wye on days of frost.
"Exe to Wye" is still aesthetically offensive. The struggle to find rhymes
is obtrusive and disconcerting almost throughout the passage:
might have lost her way/ ... and some say
I know. You know./It was a night of thaw, a night of blow.
Black spring/Stood just around the corner, shivering
A night of blow??? This simply is not skilful or convincing verse, let alone
poetry. Genuinely great English poetry succeeds in employing rhyme without
drawing attention to its rhymes, in spite of the difficulty of incorporating
rhymed verse-forms, which is inherent in the language. Even Keats,
notoriously, falters now and then. But only now and then.
A matter of taste, in the end. My taste is not broad enough to accommodate
Pale Fire into the canon of great poetry. Shade, imho, would have done better
to follow Wordsworth's, or even Shakespeare's, blank verse more closely.
Charles
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm