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