most poetic prose authors?

[nathanielfirst]

I was recalling a high school english class lesson the other day, on cormac mccarthy's All the Pretty Horses, in which our teacher drew our attention to his style esp. on the first few pages, "the candle flame and the image of the candle flame"... it got me thinking, are there prose authors that sound almost poetic, who use a careful attention to word choice and rhythm (over say, character development, or suspense, or plot twists) - I've never encountered any tho i guess sometimes ray bradbury might somewhat approximate what I'm talking about, or i'd guess I could go searching for authors involved in magic realism... i'm aware hemingway paid close attention to his sentances, but his are not rhythmatic nor rhyming, and are too spare, i'd be looking for more florid than him anyways... not neccesarily a rhyme all the way through the text, or rhyming; I mean more... that the author pays attention to the way the sentance is structured, uses rhythm, uses imagery, thinks of the way the reader will percieve the text as he reads it (rather than the concepts represented by the text - i.e. the structure of sentances is art, and the novel is art due to that and not some especially intricate plot, or especially insightful character building, or exceptional view of the world) even in such a way that, if you translated it to other languages, the effect might be lost... does anyone have any idea of authors like this?

[Janine]

D.H.Lawrence and Thomas Hardy; read some of their descriptive writing; just beautiful. Lawrence's "The Trespasser" is pure prose 'poetry'.

[metal134]

I would say that Thomas Pynchon is certainly like that at times.

[The Comedian]

For sheer descriptive beauty, read Barry Lopez (any of his work, really); but I think his Arctic Dreams has some of the most poetic and finest prose that I have read from a living author.

[blackbird_9]

Kerouac

[stlukesguild]

Some obvious examples would include Melville's Moby Dick, Proust's In Search of Lost Time, Falubert's Madame Bovary, Nabokov... Italo Calvino... certainly McCarthy's Blood Meridian (in which passages of the most exquisite and visionary splendor exist right along side of some of the most horrific passages ever set to print.

[IJustMadeThatUp]

[QUOTE=stlukesguild;717034]Flaubert's Madame Bovary, QUOTE]

Bugger! You beat me to it.

[RichardHresko]

Hermann Hesse and James Joyce.

[billl]

oh yeah, just open up Finnegan's Wake (by Joyce) at the bookstore, flip through that.

[PoeticPassions]

I would say a lot of Fitzgerald's works are quite poetic in prose. As well as Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

[prendrelemick]

I agree with Marquez, also Laurie Lee has thrown together a poetic phrase or two.

[JBI]

Mashima, and many other Japanese writers.

[JCamilo]

Baudelaire, and his poetry even in prose, Borges, Guimaraes Rosa, Garcia-Marquez, Lewis Carroll...

[emily00]

I was recalling a high school english class lesson the other day, on cormac mccarthy's All the Pretty Horses, in which our teacher drew our attention to his style esp. on the first few pages, "the candle flame and the image of the candle flame"... it got me thinking, are there prose authors that sound almost poetic, who use a careful attention to word choice and rhythm (over say, character development, or suspense, or plot twists) - I've never encountered any tho i guess sometimes ray bradbury might somewhat approximate what I'm talking about, or i'd guess I could go searching for authors involved in magic realism... i'm aware hemingway paid close attention to his sentances, but his are not rhythmatic nor rhyming, and are too spare, i'd be looking for more florid than him anyways... not neccesarily a rhyme all the way through the text, or rhyming; I mean more... that the author pays attention to the way the sentance is structured, uses rhythm, uses imagery, thinks of the way the reader will percieve the text as he reads it (rather than the concepts represented by the text - i.e. the structure of sentances is art, and the novel is art due to that and not some especially intricate plot, or especially insightful character building, or exceptional view of the world) even in such a way that, if you translated it to other languages, the effect might be lost... does anyone have any idea of authors like this?

James Joyce
JP Donleavy
Dylan Thomas
D H Lawrence
Emily Bronte
V S Naipaul

When you have tried all these, come back and I will suggest some more! :)

[sixsmith]

Some obvious examples would include Melville's Moby Dick, Proust's In Search of Lost Time, Falubert's Madame Bovary, Nabokov... Italo Calvino... certainly McCarthy's Blood Meridian (in which passages of the most exquisite and visionary splendor exist right along side of some of the most horrific passages ever set to print.

Second McCarthy here. 'Suttree' is also written in an incredibly ornate and intoxicating prose. I think 'Blood Meridian' and 'Suttree' are both (stylistically and otherwise) far greater achievements than the 'Border Trilogy' (his three weakest books)

[JCamilo]

my opinion is that The Road is when Jesus meets Romero's zoombie movies. But damn good.

[Dr. Hill]

Surprised Oscar Wilde hasn't been mentioned. I would also say DH Lawrence.

[Equality72521]

Oooooh. Faulkner. Sound and the Fury was rather poetic in Quentins section. Just the opening two paragraphs were amazing!

[tulysg1982]

I think D.H Lawrence is the most poetic prose writer. Lawrence is my favorite not for the contents or plots for his novels rather for his exquisite language.Its a reader's great satisfaction to through such eloquent diction. And his extensive use of imagery and his descriptive styles are simply very rhythmic.

[FallingWings]

My vote would go for either Annie Dillard in An American Childhood or Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451. John Steinbeck in The Pearl and Paul Gallico in The Snow Goose are pretty close seconds, though.

[promtbr]

Big big fan of lyrical prose. Of the fiction I have read in the last 6 or so months. I would arbitrarily rank their 'Lyricism'? Lyricality? lol...

(because I can)

1) Blood Meridian-- Cormac McCarthy
2) The Pederson Kid --- WH Gass
3) Dreams of My Russian Summers-- Andrei Makine
4) Murphy-- Samuel Beckett

o those first two listed, there are some timeless passages ...

---

[WICKES]

I agree with DH Lawrence and Thomas Hardy.

I'm not sure about poetic prose, but for sheer beauty I always turn to Evelyn Waugh. His prose is exquisite.

[Tallgren]

Michael Ondaatje has sometimes even been criticized for his overly poetic language. I find it stunning. Check out The English Patient or In the Skin of a Lion for some truly magnifying prose and really interesting looks at history, politics, and identity.

[kelby_lake]

English Patient was good.

Fitzgerald or Nabokov

[livelaughlove]

Ondaatje's prose in the English Patient was superb. Also, another one whom I don't think has been mentioned... Virginia Woolfe.

[Tsuyoiko]

I just started reading Ulysses by James Joyce, and it's very poetic:


Woodshadows floated silently by through the morning peace from the stairhead seaward where he gazed. Inshore and farther out the mirror of water whitened, spurned by lightshod hurrying feet. White breast of the dim sea. The twining stresses, two by two. A hand plucking the harpstrings merging their twining chords. Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim tide.

[electricpenguin]

Anne Marie Macdonald's prose in Fall on your Knees is absolutely beautiful. Operatic. I'd recommend it for anyone who likes to read beautiful-sounding prose.

EP

[Nick Capozzoli]

For my taste, there are many...all the novelists and short story writers I admire write "prose" that captivates like good poetry. Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, Hardy, James, Faulkner, etc. etc. etc. There are even non-fiction writers (Darwin) whose prose at times is so precise and charged it seems like poetic revelation.

As regards Melville, the section of Moby Dick on the meaning of the whiteness of the whale sends shivers down my spine every time I read it, and I've memorized it as I would a great poem. Check out the Encantadas.

Nick

[feignfeign]

can someone explain to me about how a novel is poetic in the sense described here? Is it that certain important excerpts are written in a way with a rhythm and rhyme scheme?

Can anyone share with me their favorite prose-esque excerpt. I really want to become more educated about literature and learn to appreciate it more

[mayneverhave]

can someone explain to me about how a novel is poetic in the sense described here? Is it that certain important excerpts are written in a way with a rhythm and rhyme scheme?

Can anyone share with me their favorite prose-esque excerpt. I really want to become more educated about literature and learn to appreciate it more

In the sense used here (and the sense that I typically see the word in use) I take "poetic" to be synonomous with lyrical - rythmic perhaps, but I would describe it mostly as lofty and with an acute attention to sensual details.

[PoeticPassions]

I am also going to add to the list, among the authors I have already mentioned, Ralph Ellison. Invisibe Man is quite poetic at times.

[kelby_lake]

In the sense used here (and the sense that I typically see the word in use) I take "poetic" to be synonomous with lyrical - rythmic perhaps, but I would describe it mostly as lofty and with an acute attention to sensual details.

Agreed. No real rhythm as such, but the use of evocative words. If you can read it out and it sounds nice, it's probably lyrical.

[Nick Capozzoli]

Agreed. No real rhythm as such, but the use of evocative words. If you can read it out and it sounds nice, it's probably lyrical.

It depends on what you mean by "poetic." Calling a novel poetic is somehat oxymoronic, because it mixes descriptive categories. What about a "novelistic" short story or a "novelistic" play (or vice-versa)? Nonetheless there are certain characteristics of a language that we consider "poetic." I'll be damned if I can say to everyone's satisfaction what they are. Rhyme? Meter/rhythm? "Elegance?" "Beauty?" "Striking Imagery?"

My working definition of poetic langauge is that it is language that cuts through the bull**** of common ordinary communication and when you hear it, it does more than communicate information. It does communicate information, but it does so in a way that makes the information startlingly clear. You'll know it's poetic when the particular combination of words sends a shiver down your spine. I've experienced such shivers reading great poems, great plays, great novels, and even great works of "non-fiction." It has nothing to do with rhyme or meter. There's plenty of non-poetic stuff written in perfect rhyme and meter.:)

[JBI]

Calling a novel poetic isn't oxymoronic - calling prose poetic is, to an extent, but still - the line is vague - the difference really, between poetry and prose, is a tendency toward image and metaphor in poetry, which, and is translated into prose often. The best example, perhaps, being something like Sheila Watson's The Double Hook, which reads more like poetry than anything else, despite being in sentences.




3

Ara saw her fishing along the creek. Fishing shamelessly with bait. Fishing without a glance towards her daughter-in-law, who was hanging washing on the bushes near the rail fence.

I might as well be dead for all of her, Ara said. Passing her own son’s house and never offering a fry even today when he’s off and gone with the post.

The old lady fished on with a concentrated ferocity as if she were fishing for something she’d never found.

Ara hung William’s drawers on a rail. She had covered the bushes with towels.

Then she looked out from under her shag of bangs at the old lady’s back.

It’s not for fish she fishes, Ara thought. There’s only three of them. They can’t eat all the fish she’d catch.

William would try to explain, but he couldn’t. He only felt, but he always felt he knew. He could give half a dozen reasons for anything. When a woman on his route flagged him down with a coat and asked him to bring back a spool of thread from the town below, he’d explain that thread has a hundred uses. When it comes down to it, he’d say, there’s no telling what thread is for. I knew a woman once, he’d say, who used it to sew up her man after he was throwed on a barbed-wire fence.

Ara could hear the cow mumbling dry grass by the bushes. There was no other sound.

The old lady was rounding the bend of the creek. She was throwing her line into a rock pool. She was fishing upstream to the source. That way she’d come to the bones of the hills and the flats between where the herd cows ranged. They’d turn their tails to her and stretch their hides tight. They’d turn their living flesh from her as she’d turned hers from others.

The water was running low in the creek. Except in the pools, it would be hardly up to the ankle. Yet as she watched the old lady, Ara felt death leaking through from the centre of the earth. Death rising to the knee. Death rising to the loin.

She raised her chin to unseat the thought. No such thing could happen. The water was drying away. It lay only in the deep pools.


Ara wasn’t sure where water started.

William wouldn’t hesitate: It comes gurgling up from inside the hill over beyond the lake. There’s water over and it falls down. There’s water under and it rushes up. The trouble with water is it never rushes at the right time. The creeks dry up and the grass with them. There are men, he’d say, have seen their whole place fade like a cheap shirt. And there’s no way a man can fold it up and bring it in out of the sun. You can save a cabbage plant or a tomato plant with tents of paper if you’ve got the paper, but there’s no human being living can tent a field and pasture.

I’ve seen cows, he’d say, with lard running off them into the ground. The most unaccountable thing, he’d say, is the way the sun falls. I’ve seen a great cow, he’d say, throw no more shadow for its calf than a lean rabbit.


Ara looked over the fence. There was no one on the road. It lay white across the burnt grass.

Coyote made the land his pastime. He stretched out his paw. He breathed on the grass. His spittle eyed it with prickly pear.

Ara went into the house. She filled the basin at the pump in the kitchen and cooled her feet in the water.

We’ve never had a pump in our house all the years we’ve lived here, she’d heard Greta say. Someday, she’d say, you’ll lift the handle and stand waiting till eternity. James brings water in barrels from the spring. The thing about a barrel is you take it where you take it. There’s something fixed about a pump, fixed and uncertain.


Ara went to the door. She threw the water from the basin into the dust. She watched the water roll in balls on the ground. Roll and divide and spin.

The old lady had disappeared.

Ara put on a straw hat. She tied it with a bootlace under the chin. She wiped the top of the table with her apron which she threw behind a pile of papers in the corner. She went to the fence and leaned against the rails.

If a man lost the road in the land round William Potter’s, he couldn’t find his way by keeping to the creek bottom for the creek flowed this way and that at the land’s whim. The earth fell away in hills and clefts as if it had been dropped carelessly wrinkled on the bare floor of the world.

Even God’s eye could not spy out the men lost here already, Ara thought. He had looked mercifully on the people of Nineveh though they did not know their right hand and their left. But there were not enough people here to attract his attention. The cattle were scrub cattle. The men lay like sift in the cracks of the earth.

Standing against the rails of the fence, she looked out over the yellow grass. The empty road leading from James’s gate went on from William’s past the streaked hills, past the Wagners’, down over the culvert, past Felix Prosper’s.


from http://www.mcclelland.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780771094576&view=excerpt

[kelby_lake]

It depends on what you mean by "poetic." Calling a novel poetic is somehat oxymoronic, because it mixes descriptive categories. What about a "novelistic" short story or a "novelistic" play (or vice-versa)?

I'd be pretty impressed if I read a 'novelistic' short story. Novels don't translate well into plays, generally.

[imthefoolonthehill]

feitell.

[MorpheusSandman]

Apparently Tolstoy uses a lot of poetic devices in War & Peace that don't translate too well into English. He actually considered the work an 'epic in prose' rather than a novel when it was first released. Of modern authors I think Ian Macleod is a very lyrical, sensual, visual writer and I tend to enjoy him for his cadence and images more than for his stories.

[ThousandthIsle]

There are even non-fiction writers (Darwin) whose prose at times is so precise and charged it seems like poetic revelation.


Nick - this is why I love Roger Ebert as a movie critic. An unexpected source of poetry (at times).

[libernaut]

definitely agree about Kerouac having poetic prose,

also would like to add Hermann Hesse,

a beautiful master of metaphor

[Madame X]

Rainer Maria Rilke tops my list; such pretty German. :) Of course, as we all know he was primarily a poet which I'm sure gives him a considerable edge in this contest, but, mein gott, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge is one phenomenal piece of prose.

Die Frau erschrak und hob sich aus sich ab, zu schnell, zu heftig, so daß das Gesicht in den zwei Händen blieb. Ich konnte es darin liegen sehen, seine hohle Form. Es kostete mich unbeschreibliche Anstrengung, bei diesen Händen zu bleiben und nicht zu schauen, was sich aus ihnen abgerissen hatte.

I came across this translation (not sure who it's by but it's still marginally better than what I would've offered :D):

The woman sat up, frightened, she pulled out of herself too quickly, too violently, so that her face was left in her two hands. I could see it lying there; its hollow form. It cost me an indescribable effort to stay with those two hands, not to look at what had been torn out of them.

[March Hare]

I second (or third) Faulkner and add Robert Penn Warren to the discussion.

[nice_hair]

4:48 psychosis, by Sarah Kane. The way she wrote that play is quite amazing and I find there is so much depth to each sentence. Scope it! x.