Below is an email of mine to a friend.
(I have commenced a project I assigned to myself a month or two ago: reading the novels of Thomas Wolfe.)
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“… a river that draws its flood and movement majestically from great depths, out of purple hills at evening” — Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again, Book One, Chapter 5
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“This is what you called Wolfe’s prose poetry (or did you say ‘poetic prose’?).
“Wolfe’s critics might say ‘purple prose.’
“I find it beautiful, lyrical, powerful.
“(Read a small segment of a great writer’s prose and you already know a lot about his works. Not anyone could write this passage.)”
— Roger W. Smith
August 5, 2017
Beauty, as ever, is as much in the eyes of the beholder as in the words on the page.
Very true, Tom, but I wonder. Perhaps you find me rushing to judgment and look
upon Wolfe with a jaundiced eye.
Once, in a course at Columbia University, we were given the assignment of analyzing a
lyrical passage from “The Private Papers of Henry Rycroft” by George Gissing. I
had never heard of Gissing, and we
were not told which work the quoted passage was from. I said to myself, “I’ve got to read this writer. My instincts didn’t deceive me. A soupçon of Gissing’s
prose was enough.