>>7284218I liked a lot when is well done. Some of my favorite writers have that baroque verbal texture on their work. Some examples would be Montaigne, Nabokov and Shakespeare. I feel that Calvino too is quite poetical, and even a scientific writer like Galileo used lots of images in his work.
As for Shakespeare: why everyone acknowledge him (and justly so) as the greatest writer of all time, but his style of blending metaphor with metaphor, pilling up simile upon simile, and almost making his thinking move foward almost always in imagery: why this great style is accursed in every other writer, but hailed in Shakespeare? Yes, Shakespeare used with great mastery, but he did not achieve this level from one day to another: it took him quite some time. If it was up to you guys or most writing teachers and University professors a person with the same gift was going to be killed in the shell before it could even spread its wings and dry the embryonic fluids in the sun.
I guess that the poetic and “purple” style can be very effective and wonderfully beautiful, but it needs to be mastered, as any other style. I also think that is good to blend natural and earthy writing with more colorful and poetic moments.
In short, I do not know what all the “it’s a thing for amateurs” and “it reeks of inexperience” it’s all about. A thing for amateurs, you people say? Then why can’t you guys achieve the same great moments of Shakespeare and Nabokov? And why do you people criticize purple prose but idolize that confuse style of writing of DFW and Pynchon, a style that is neither simple and direct nor poetical?
I think you guys are simply echoing the main opinion of our days. When you read books of literary history you probably think - when some main idea or concept of the past centuries is described as the norm, and that writers who wrote differently were viewed with suspicion - you probably think that you would readily be able to identify the greatness in those (now classic) authors, and would not be victims of the contemporary literary opinions about style. And yet here you are, doing exactly the opposite: accepting without any hesitation the current opinion (simplicity and dryness = good) and closing your eyes to exceptions.
