Long before his famous works Lolita or Pale Fire, author Vladimir Nabokov submitted a poem about Superman to the New Yorker.

Titled The Man of Tomorrow’s Lament, the rather tongue-in-cheek rhyming poem is a first-person account of the superhero’s biggest problem – that he’s too strong to make love to Lois Lane. Although the New Yorker had published two of Nabokov’s problems recently, poetry editor Charles Pearce rejected this one, stating, ‘Our readers wouldn’t quite get it.’