P andVN

[MalignD at aol.com]

Charles Albert:

<<Read:  Milton, Coleridge, Keats, Wordsworth.'"

an uninformed observation....

I've always found that Pynchon's prose reads like poetry, in the respect that 
it betrays an internal rhythm. By contrast, the much lauded beginning of 
UNDERWORLD, though admirable in may ways, is plauged by DeLillo's "unmetric" 
style.....reads a little like a bad pointillist.

Pale Fire (the poem) reads remarkably like prose (check it out)....and this 
is something I suspect Nabokov picked up from Wordsworth.>>

Not sure what to say to this except to each his own.  I've never found 
Pynchon's prose particularly "poetic," except in those passages where he 
intends a poetic effect, e.g., the passage in M&D beginning:

Does Britannia, when she sleeps, dream?  Is America her dream?--in which all 
that cannot pass in the metropolitan Wakefulness is allow'd Expression away 
in the restless Slumber of these Provinces, ... etc. (p. 345)

As to Wordsworth, what you describe and fault in his poetry as prose-like 
isn't a fault to my ears (and it's probably why VN recommended him):

Five years have past; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur.--Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.

You fault that?  (Note, by the way, the period-dash, used by P in M&D.)

As to Pale Fire, with its rhyming couplets of iambic pentameter, the more 
obvious model is Pope, not Browning.  Pope:

At Timon's Villa let us pass a day,
Where all cry out, "What sums are thrown away!"
So proud, so grand, of that stupendous air,
Soft and agreeable come never there.
Greatness, with Timon, dwells in such a draught
as brings all Brobdignag before your thought:
To compass this, his building is a Town,
His pond an ocean, his parterre a Down:
Who but must laugh, the master when he sees?
a puny insect, shiv'ring at a breeze!

Compare:

We have been married forty years.  At least
Four thousand times your pillow has been creased
By our two heads.  Four hundred thousand times
The tall clock with the hoarse Westminster chimes
Has marked our common hour.  How many more
Free calendars shall grace the kitchen door?

And, turning this around, do you not find Nabokov's prose poetic?

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.  My sin, my soul.  Lo-lee-ta:  
the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at 
three, on the teeth.  Lo. Lee. ta.

"She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock.  
She was Lola in slacks.  She was Dolly at school.  She was Dolores on the 
dotted line.  But in my arms she was always Lolita."

It goes on like that for some 300 pages.

And as for DeLillo, his style is pretty much the only reason I read him.