Thread: Hidden Gems
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Unread 04-04-2017, 03:54 PM
Aaron Novick Aaron Novick is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Orwn Acra View Post
And surely Nabokov was jesting re: Emerson. His is the sort of literature Nabokov disliked.
Surely. And yet there is nothing in the passage itself that signals that he is anything but serious. The only evidence that he was jesting is the immediate reaction (which we all seem to share): "wait, what?" And I don't think there's any other instances of his claiming to like something and not meaning it. So I am more and more convinced that Nabokov inscrutably and inexplicably really did just like Emerson's poetry.

Sorry to slightly hijack this thread, but I want to share Nabokov's finest insult of a fellow writer, which never stops being hilarious:
As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.
Also on the topic on excellent insults of authors by authors, but getting back to poetry, Emerson once called Poe "the jingle man."
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