The only convincing argument for the verse of Pale Fire as poetry would lie
in the judgement of major practitioners of modern poetry. If in the critical
work and correspondence of  Heaney, Pound, MacLeish, Eliot, Ransom,
Zukofsky, Rexroth, Murray, Bishop, Hecht, Montale, Gunn, Moore, Hughes,
Merrill, Merwin,Walcott, Berryman, Frost, Jarrell, Lowell etc., of the time
one encounters a widespread judgement that Nabokov was recognized as a
fellow poet, and welcomed to the fold of poets, not versifiers, then poetry
it is. Critics of course count, but only critics who, as accomplished
writers of verse and poetry, know the instinctive physical difference
between the mode of composition occasioning the respective forms.

Peter Dale