----- Original Message -----
From: jansymello
To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum
Sent: Sunday, February 07, 2010 3:23 PM
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] [NABOKOV-L] Incidental Nabokov and a confession

Brian Boyd: "Interesting that the very sonnet Jansy chooses should be the one that in my forthcoming essay on the "pale Fire" poem I discuss in depth comparing the intensity of patterning in Shakespeare's sonnets and in Shade--where the latter, I must say, shows more intensity and in more dimensions."
 
JM: Perhaps my ears are atuned "in the right direction," as BB's most certainly are. I wonder if he is building a new "Exegi Monumentum" to Nabokov in his essay on Shade?  However my point is that Shade's "muse, his versipel" is not as potent as Shakespeare's in "Midsummer-Night's Dream" and, also, I argue that Shade demonstrates his awareness of this "lack"
 
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* "Speak, Memory"..."And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction."
 
Kinbote is probably against Shade's choice of "Pale Fire" as a title for his long poem. 
I just recovered his note about another title, this one lifted from Browning's "The Last Duchess." ("Taming a Sea-Horse"/ "The Untamed Seahorse"). There's a coincidence, of sorts...
Cf. "...condemn the fashionable device of entitling...a long poem ... with a phrase lifted from a more or less celebrated poetical work of the past... degrading in regard to the talent that substitutes the easy allusiveness of literacy for original fancy...since anybody can flip through a Midsummer-Night’s Dream or Romeo and Juliet, or, perhaps, the Sonnets and take his pick."
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