Nabokov, as we have seen, complained that Henry James had not demonstrated the poetical prowess of his imaginary poet, Jeffrey Aspern, in The Aspern Papers (N–W 53). To take another instance, however, Boris Pasternak's attempt to do that very thing on behalf of Iurii Zhivago was evidently not of itself sufficient to allow him to escape Nabokov's sharp censure. In the case of his own fiction, Nabokov had earlier given plentiful examples of the works (poetical and prose) of Fyodor in The Gift; when he came to write Pale Fire, he was to create the eponymous 999-line, 4-canto narrative poem ascribed to his protagonist, the imaginary American poet John Francis Shade (1898–1959). Not that Shade is necessarily to be considered the principal protagonist of the novel that bears the name of his supposed poetic creation; that honour, in the view of many commentators (although the matter remains debatable, as does just about everything else in Pale Fire), would belong to the figure best known as Charles Kinbote, Shade's posthumous editor. Nothing in a novel by Nabokov, though, is ever going to be as simple as all that.

Nabokov later nominated Shade's ‘American poem’ as ‘the hardest stuff I ever had to compose’ (SO 55); as for Shade's own bardic rating, Nabokov declared him ‘by far the greatest of invented poets’ (SO 59). Brian Boyd accords ‘Pale Fire’ – the poem – ‘all the assurance of a masterpiece’, going so far as to consider that ‘English poetry has few things better to offer than “Pale Fire”; ’ (B Am 439–40). Others are rather more underwhelmed: it has been called ‘a bumbling poem by bumbling John Shade’, ‘a seriously flawed masterpiece’, and ‘good only in spots’. Marianna Torgovnick, author of the last remark, may well be justified in her view that any attempt at evaluation of Shade's poem itself involves succumbing to one of Nabokov's many traps. Shade appears to consider himself ‘just behind / (one oozy footstep) [Robert] Frost ’ (‘PF’ ll. 425–6).