What even constitutes purple prose? Is it always bad? If its not, what separates good purple prose from bad purple prose
Purple prose
Isaac Gonzalez
Other urls found in this thread:
Ryder Ward
Purple prose is prose that's verbose but doesn't achieve anything with that verbosity.
Carson Powell
Thomas Pynchon is purple prose
Ian Fisher
What do you mean by "achieve"? Like just masturbatory flourish? Or style for style's sake?
Blake Cooper
Style for style's sake is fine, as long as it actually sounds good. If the verbosity serves some function - tells us something about the speaker, provides specificity, or just sounds good - then it's acceptable. If the prose is verbose but reads badly as a result, it's unacceptable.
Andrew Sanders
Walter Pater is some pure purple prose bullshit.
Kayden Ramirez
Purple prose is always bad. It is over the top descriptive, poetic and emotionally exaggerated, but fake, cliched, illogical and pointless. Shakespeare wrote in an exaggerated manner, but he was still governed by rules of good taste, knew exactly where to stop and basically controlled everything to create a meaningful whole, not just pretty images.
Charles Foster
I don't think that's completely it, good prose doesn't REQUIRE a good purpose or meaning
Purple prose is when the intricacy defeats itself and the illusion of good writing is shattered. Purple prose is when you can just feel how full the author was of himself when he wrote it.
Gabriel Mitchell
>In pompous introductions, and such as promise a great deal, it generally happens that one or two verses of purple patch-work, that may make a great show, are tagged on; as when the grove and the altar of Diana and the meandering of a current hastening through pleasant fields, or the river Rhine, or the rainbow is described. But here there was no room for these [fine things]: perhaps, too, you know how to draw a cypress: but what is that to the purpose, if he, whe is painted for the given price, is [to be represented as] swimming hopeless out of a shipwreck? A large vase at first was designed: why, as the wheel revolves, turns out a little pitcher? In a word, be your subject what it will, let it be merely simple and uniform.
>The great majority of us poets, father, and youths worthy such a father, are misled by the appearance of right. I labor to be concise, I become obscure: nerves and spirit fail him, that aims at the easy: one, that pretends to be sublime, proves bombastical: he who is too cautious and fearful of the storm, crawls along the ground: he who wants to vary his subject in a marvelous manner, paints the dolphin in the woods, the boar in the sea. The avoiding of an error leads to a fault, if it lack skill.
Xavier Cox
This is often the mistake that people make-- Thomas Pynchon is the opposite of purple prose. Good examples of purple prose can be found in Stephen King's The Stand.