Just a trifle I ran across while reading about the last days of Swift in Craik's "The Life of Jonathan Swift" (1894):
"Looking at himself in the glass, he was said to have exclaimed in pity, 'Poor old man!'."
I wonder if this provides the origin of Shade's variant line, "Poor old man Swift, poor --, poor Baudelaire." In which case, was John Shade also looking in the glass when he wrote that line?
On another topic, I found the idea Lish editing VN very amusing, though I agree with Jim Twiggs that Lish's Carver is almost always preferable to Carver's Carver.
Matt