NPPF: CANTO ONE D. Fowler/ for Jasper

[cfalbert]

> Thanks for the clarification, Charles.  Given your timeline (with which I
> have some distant familiarity from my previous career as an English
major),
> I think it might be useful to ask why Shade positions himself before
> Wordsworth. "

How do you mean   "before"?

"Shade is a Pope scholar of course, so he is likely to be more
> familiar or comfortable with this form, and perhaps he prefers it, but
it's
> certainly not cutting-edge poetry (I have a friend who may still have
> Charles Bernstein's number and email -- maybe I'll ask him to ask for an
> opinion)."

Shade, along with Nab and Wordsworth are decidedly "retro". But beyond
offering the Zembla excerpt (and this will become much more important in a
few hours), Pope may not play such a  large role in the "scheme" of PF.
There is little in Pope's subject matter which conforms to the concerns of
Shade's poems, but a remarkable congruity with Wordsworth's. That said, it
seems  to me that the "heroic couplet" form may have peaked with Goldsmith,
as Wordsworth opus seems to include very few examples (RESOLUTION &
INDEPENDENCE is the only one  of those offered in Norton which combines
iambic  pentameter,  and couplets).

"  We can surmise Shade's opinion of Eliot.  Is he a "retro" poet?"

If  I could type faster, I'd give you the entire Fowler take........see if I
can find the strength......

> Does Shade want a return to older forms, is he an anti-modernist?

I'd say you were on relative sure ground here......

"  Is he
> therefore likely to be as widely accepted and lauded in 1959 as we are
given
> to believe?"

I'm not sure Shade wrote PF with "acceptance" in mind - this may have been a
project intended to satisfy a more personal need.....

"Also, as you say, why is the form of the poem so clearly at odds with the
subject?  Is poetry a closed ("vicious") circle to him?  Is "Pale Fire"
thematically an attempt to escape from its own form?"

I don't know about "at odds", I just found it interesting that he would
employ a  poetic structure normally associated with "closure and surety" in
the service of a work so clearly intended to offer anything but......

love,
cfa