Poetry Tripping up Prose

So it is a common thing to hear reviewers and book-lovers complain about ‘purple prose.’ Like most complaints, however, this is shorthand for something more complicated. At times we like highly poetic prose, even relish it. What most people mean when they say ‘purple prose’ isn’t simply “elegant or florid” but rather “overly-dramatic or painfully excessive.”

And what makes it ‘excessive’? On the face of it, of course, it’s usually a matter of subjective taste. So we have to grant the subjectivity of it, and go from there in order to try and understand why we sometimes love poetry in our prose and sometimes loathe it.

(This applies to the opposite style as well: sometimes we love a stark, stripped sentence. Other times it makes us want to slap someone…so, extrapolate)

Is It Any Good?

The first and most obvious hurdle that must be passed is whether or not the writing is just plain bad: cliche-riddled, weak, repetitive, and amateurish. I am referring to something that nearly everyone could point to as an example of bad writing, objectively. The craft has not been honed, effort has not been made. In the midst of such writing, purple prose will stand out garishly. It is gaudy there, because it is thoughtless, incoherent adornment.

But let’s be honest, it’s not just bad writing that high-lights overwrought prose. This can happen in decent writing too. Even in excellent writing, and it is this that I want to analyze.

Usually when describing books I dislike, I avoid mentioning titles or authors. I’m not here to mock or deride. But in this case I am going to have to name names. If a book you love is torn apart here, I’m sorry, but it’s too good purpose, I promise!

(Theoretically) Good Prose, Terrible Story

Some people that I both love and respect, and who have excellent taste in literature recommended this book to me, which I ended up loathing. I say this so that you might take everything I’m about to say about the book Beatrice and Virgil with a grain of salt. I hated it. People of indisputably good taste and character loved it. Make of that what you will.

I started reading Beatrice and Virgil, a literary novel that is a supposed attempt to write about the Holocaust in the abstract, or obliquely, or metaphorically or whatever. The writing drew me in, and for a good while I was wondering with deep curiosity what it all meant, where it was all headed. The writing is full of rich, detailed descriptions and metaphors. But, as far as I’m concerned, the book was utterly soulless. Beautifully written, and empty, empty, empty. A gilded, barren vessel, writing about a grave topic in a haphazard, pseudo-deep, fiercely pointless way. And unless the metaphor was supposed to be “pointlessness and emptiness,” I think the book completely failed, in spite of excellent writing.

It made me hate the elegant metaphors all the more because they, so to speak, fell to the ground without accomplishing any sort of purpose. This book feels to me like the author had a interesting, (albeit extremely pretentious and aloof) premise, plus a notebook full of cool, but utterly irrelevant and detached metaphors that he wanted to cram in there. And that’s it. That’s the whole kit and caboodle.

None of the beautiful phrases are preserved in my mind because they had (or seemed to have) no real substance beneath them. I think the very quality of the writing made my disappointment far more severe. I’ve read poorly written books that handled topics ineffectively, but there was not the sense of injury after reading those, as though something important had been ill-used by hands that clearly had the capacity to do much better.

The only other book that made me feel this livid–this deep sense of a failure of the narrative, a insulting usage of the subject matter, and a frustrating use of metaphor and poetry–was The Book Thief. Once again, many intelligent people I love and respect liked this book a great deal. Keep salting as we go along, because the subjective and objective can be tricky to disentangle with books like this.

Much like with Beatrice and Virgil, I was struck with the beauty and strength of the prose in the first few pages. “Sky like burned soup,” Death says. That stuck with me. But as the book wore on (and I do say wore on…weary irritation and frustration is the chief emotion I associate with this book), the blankness, meanness, and emptiness of most of the characters, and of the story as a whole, caused those very same strengths–the prose–to collapse before my eyes. The good, misapplied, turned very, very sour.

Soon every single metaphor stood out like a sore thumb–irrational and sometimes eye-gougingly stupid. It was as if, half-way through the book, the author tried to stick in every last weird phrase he really ought to have reserved for a book that actually needed them. This one did not. Unlike with Beatrice and Virgil, which I disliked for what I saw as it’s horrible misuse of a grave topic, but which was well-written from beginning to end, I started to loathe the prose in The Book Thief to the point where reading it was like nails on a chalkboard. It was with fierce and stubborn grit that I managed to finish it at all.

These are the only two books I have ever read that made me feel a visceral anger in this way. The fact that they are both (the former however loosely) associated with WWII/Holocaust may have much to do with it. I felt personally insulted (???) by the way the authors approached the topic. I fully acknowledge this opinion to be VERY subjective, but it seemed to me that the authors cared more about their style of prose than they did about the very serious, very important historical subject matter. I’m sure that can’t be true, but never have I read a WWII or Holocaust narrative that made me feel so disconnected from the subject matter, as if the topic was totally incidental to the author. A mere decoration they felt added the desired gravitas.

Again, it seems nearly impossible that this is actually so, but the conclusion I draw from this is that if someone is knowledgeable, or feels particularly strongly about a topic/era/subject then a disrespectful or inept–or even simply unusual!–handling of it is going to cast an ugly shadow on the prose for them. The prose is too high above the theme, and given more thought than the theme. It should be stricken and reversed, as one evil chocolatier might say.

All I have said of these particular stories may be quite subjective, but from my own reaction I can learn some principles to more broadly apply: Poetry, I think, is ruined if the treatment of the subject and the beauty of the words do not match. You might notice this in a song you like: the music and the pounding rhythm of the words are awesome…but then the more you think about the words, the more you realize how stupid and shallow they actually are. It can blunt even that which was rightly sharp.

Poetry Steals the Spotlight, for Good or Ill

On the other end of the spectrum, I have one example of a book with a theme and purpose that I thought was quite excellent, quite worthy, but the excessively florid style grated so much that I couldn’t finish it. The book is call One Thousand Gifts. It is about gratitude and what the author has to say is, I believe, utterly true and necessary to hear. But she had a very particular swirliness to her prose which I believe many people would connect to, but which drove me up the wall.

To me, it was intrusive and often eye-roll inducing, and even though I kept thinking “what she is saying, underneath all that erratic decoration, is fully true…but how long can I put up with this?”

This is the prose equivalent of adding so many curlicues to your calligraphy that the word can no longer be read. It may be beautiful (to some) but it is increasingly illegible to most. Purple is not a problem. But it becomes one if we begin to have difficulty seeing the forest for the trees. If you have to scale a mountain of metaphors to get to the heart of the paragraph’s matter, it can become very tedious.

Obviously this is a matter of taste. We have different likes, dislikes, different thresholds for pretty versus practical. But for my own edification, it reminds me that my prose may be as purple (or gray, or black-and-white) as it pleases, provide it doesn’t tangle the readers ankles and blur their vision as they go along. It’s something for me to keep in mind, as I (obviously) tend toward the wordier end of the spectrum.

So when we say excessive, we usually mean “it got in the way.” Prose and purpose were mismatched.

The Balance

Since I have spent the last several paragraphs criticizing that which doesn’t work, I’m going to offer a few examples of that which does.

(Side-note: For fans of Beatrice and Virgil, The Book Thief, and One Thousand Gifts, I ask your pardon for all the above. I tried to be fair. Grains of salt for everybody!)

Two books that strike the balance of having rich purpose and theme, a beautiful, truly muscular use of both, and which are seamlessly poetic are: Till We Have Faces, by C.S. Lewis, and Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson. That I only have two examples shows that I am rarely satisfied, perhaps more of a mark against me than against any other authors I decry.

While reading these books I felt that there was not a single errant word. All was balanced so perfectly between fact and metaphor, between soft lilt and sharp edge. The themes were so strong and resonant and the prose matched them perfectly. It is this to which I aspire, and this which seems impossible to achieve. Reading books like this is like basking in sunlight, yet never growing too hot because of a perfectly cool breeze. It is rare, and cherished.

Side-note: There are other books that I found equally powerful, but they were simply less poetic in style (Chaim Potok’s The Promise is one of the most powerful books I’ve ever read, but the prose style is far more pragmatic, so I did not include it). I chose these two because they have precisely that right use of subtle, incisive poetry and in that usage, such strength.

I remember phrases from these books, and when I recall them, they stir in me a similar joy or sorrow as they did at first. Like a balm or a right grieving. And I am very grateful.