RS Gwynn, answering on
Edsel Ford's verses in PF, in relation to Mariane Moore's "toad"
: "This may be possible, but I suspect that Edsel Ford sent him a book and
that he admired some of the work... It's just like VN to have championed,
in a very small way, a poet from the hinterlands ...I'm sure that VN appreciated
the irony of a poet's sharing his name with an automobile, but I doubt that he
was having fun at the unfortunate E. F.'s expense. Marianne Moore's
frustrated arrangement with the Ford Motor Company has been well
documented."
JM: I agree that VN
might have championed a poet from the hinterlands, but the irony of "a
poet's sharing his name with an automobile" might also served to spice his
homage. Some of VN's "toads" ( straying a bit from Marianne Moore's
"literalists of the imagination"), though, could have been intrusions comparable
to the fresh rose Van encountered in the midst of an arrangement of
artificial roses, or to the diegetic "versipellous" effect
of estrangement he achieved elsewhere...
There is an interesting collection of stories by
Italo Calvino ( available in English under the Vintage title "Numbers in the
Dark") offering a satyrical interview with Henry Ford where HF says: "
American history is a history of journeys between boundless horizons...only the
automobile has given Americans America. Only with the automobile have they
become masters of the length and breadth of the country..." that
reminded me not simply of Lolita's road-story but also that
VN, himself, didn't drive.Looping
allusions?