The triumph of a prodigious versifier …

… Pushkin by the Bay by Bruce Bawer | The New Criterion. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The Golden Gate is composed in the “Eugene Onegin” stanza, the form invented by Pushkin a century and a half ago for his classic novel in verse. Each of Seth’s 590 sonnet-length stanzas of iambic tetrameter—like each of the 400 stanzas of Eugene Onegin—follows the rhyme scheme aBaB ccDD eFFe GG, with lower-case letters denoting feminine rhymes and capitals denoting masculine rhymes. (Perhaps the number of stanzas in The Golden Gate should actually be reckoned at 594, because Seth’s acknowledgments, dedication, table of contents, and author’s note are also written in the “Onegin” stanza—thus outdoing Pushkin, whose work was prefaced only by a dedication in verse.) Like Pushkin, Seth addresses his audience as “Gentle Reader,” divides his book into chapters, and numbers each stanza. In stanza 5.5 he acknowledges his debt to Pushkin:

Reader, enough of this apology:
But spare me if I think it best,
Before I tether my monology,
To stake a stanza to suggest
You spend some unfilled day of leisure
By that original spring of pleasure:
Sweet-watered, fluent, clear, light, blithe
(This homage merely pays a tithe
Of what in joy and inspiration
It gave me once and does not cease
To give me)—Pushkin’s masterpiece
In Johnston’s luminous translation:
Eugene Onegin—like champagne
Its effervescence stirs my brain.