Nabokov's
poem, Pale Fire (by the fictional John Shade), is a masterpiece;
Shade's poem, Pale Fire, contains unconscious self-parody and cringey
self-revelation.

   A blurry shape stepped off the reedy bank
   Into a crackling, gulping swamp, and sank.

Is there an overtone of mockery in the poem's arch treatment of
Hazel's suicide? A mocking tone with respect to the girl and to the
poem's very theme is less ambiguous elsewhere. If Hazel had been
Nabokov's daughter, it is inconceivable that he would write and
publish a serious poem about her in which she is portrayed as fat and
ugly and squinting.

Walter Miale

Exactly so. Nabokov's poem Pale Fire, by John Shade, is a masterpiece of satire, mocking the mediocrity of spirit and poetry of its self-absorbed fictional author.

 

Charles Harrison-Wallace