After distinguished poet John Shade dies, leaving behind a 999-line master work, his loving friend and neighbor Charles Kinbote publishes a heavily annotated edition to help future readers understand Shade's poem more fully. Of course, Shade's widow might disagree with Kinbote's assertion that the poem reveals Shade's disillusionment with his marriage and his deep fraternal love for a neighbor he had only recently met. Then there's Kinbote's reading of the entire poem as metaphor for the