'I was the shadow of the waxwing slain...'

I've been rereading Nabokov's Pale Fire. It's something I've been doing at intervals ever since I first read that extraordinary book 40 years ago. On that first reading, I pretty much dismissed the poem at the centre of the book (John Shade's Pale Fire) as a pastiche of the kind of cosy campus poetry so brilliantly lampooned in Kenneth Koch's comic poem Fresh Air. But with each subsequent reading, the poem has come to seem better and better, its strange and moving beauty has gradually emerged, and now I would be happy to read it, for pleasure, if it was published as a separate volume - no novel attached, no critical apparatus. If it was published? It seems it very soon will be, and all hell will break loose in Nabokovian circles. This lively piece tells the story. I'd recommend reading it to the end, since it also gives an excellent introductory account of the novel, illuminates its unique appeal, and, as it goes on, makes quite clear that the overheated world of Nabokovian scholarship can be quite as mad as anything in Charles Kinbote's commentary.