Could you guys point me to authors with extremely poetic prose style of writing, filled with metaphors and imagery? A well-known example of what I desire is Nabokov; the ideal of what I desire is the prose parts of William Shakespeare.
I'm not looking for prose poems, as are the final works of Rimbaud. What I want are writers who work on short-stories and novels, in works that have a plot and characters, but whose verbal texture is notoriously poetic.
Other examples (not as extreme as Nabokov) would be Gogol (who some times produces a wonderful succession of metaphors and poetic detail) and Dickens (who alternates dry and direct narrative passages with magnificent passages of verbal color).
tl; dr: short-story writers and novelists who use a prose filled up with poetic metaphors and colorful imagery.
Joyce
>>7795323
Could you post more examples of things like:
>“The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit."
Or the last paragraph of "The Dead"?
wallace stevens
herman melville
virginia woolf
>>7795262
Faulkner has lots of amazing passages like that, but he also has passages of 2 page long sentences of psychotic rambling (which is also good, but not what you're looking for).
I can post some of my favorite passages if you like.
>>7795332
No. If you already know that you enjoy that then it's pretty obvious you should read his other work.
Read A Portrait of the Artist and just read the whole thing. If you find yourself bored or uninterested in certain parts i.e. the Sermon chapter then just muscle through it because the novel is beautiful. Hopefully you aren't a total pleb though and will not have problems with that part or any other parts.
Looking again at OP I noticed Gogol, if you enjoy him I'd recommend Oblomov by Goncharov. There is only one part in particular that really lays the colorful, pretty imagery on thick, but the entire thing is magnificent. At least give it a shot.
Also Woolf and Faulkner
>>7795378
This one is long but so powerful: "Jewel whistles, once and shrill. The horse snorts, then
Jewel sees him, glinting for a gaudy instant among the blue shadows. Jewel
whistles again; the horse comes dropping down the slope, stiff-legged, his ears
cocking and flicking, his mis-matched eyes rolling, and fetches up twenty feet
away, broadside on, watching Jewel over his shoulder in an attitude kittenish
and alert.
"Come here, sir," Jewel says. He moves. Moving that quick his coat,
bunching, tongues swirling like so many flames. With tossing mane and tail and
rolling eye the horse makes another short curvetting rush and stops again, feet
bunched, watching Jewel. Jewel walks steadily toward him, his hands at his
sides. Save for Jewel's legs they are like two figures carved for a tableau savage in the sun.
When Jewel can almost touch him, the horse stands on his hind legs and
slashes down at Jewel. Then Jewel is enclosed by a glittering maze of hooves as
by an illusion of wings; among them, beneath the up-reared chest, he moves with
the flashing limberness of a snake. For an instant before the jerk comes onto
his arms he sees his whole body earth-free, horizontal, whipping snake-umber,
until he finds the horse's nostrils and touches earth again. Then they are
rigid, motionless, terrific, the horse back-thrust on stiffened, quivering legs,
with lowered head; Jewel with dug heels, shutting off the horse's wind with one
hand, with the other patting the horse's neck in short strokes myriad and
caressing, cursing the horse with obscene ferocity.
They stand in rigid terrific hiatus, the horse trembling and groaning.
Then Jewel is on the horse's back. He flows upward in a stooping swirl like the
lash of a whip, his body in midair shaped to the horse. For another moment the
horse stands spraddled, with lowered head, before it bursts into motion. They
descend the hill in a series of spine-jolting jumps, Jewel high, leech-like on
the withers, to the fence where the horse bunches to a scuttering halt again.
"Well," Jewel says, "you can quit now, if you got a-plenty."
Inside the barn Jewel slides running to the ground before the horse stops.
The horse enters the stall, Jewel following. Without looking back the horse
kicks at him, slamming a single hoof into the wall with a pistol-like report.
Jewel kicks him in the stomach; the horse arches his neck back, crop-toothed;
Jewel strikes him across the face with his fist and slides on to the trough and
mounts upon it. Clinging to the hay-rack he lowers his head and peers out across
the stall tops and through the doorway. The path is empty; from here he cannot
even hear Cash sawing. He reaches up and drags down hay in hurried armsful and
crams it into the rack.
"Eat," he says. "Get the goddamn stuff out of sight while you got a
chance, you pussel-gutted bastard. You sweet son of a bitch," he says.
I'll post more.
>>7795378
>>7795425
"I used to lie on the pallet in the hall, waiting until I could hear them all asleep, so I could get up and go back to the bucket. It would be black, the shelf black, the still surface of the water a round orifice in nothingness, where before I stirred it awake with the dipper I could see maybe a star or two in the bucket, and maybe in the dipper a star or two before I drank."
>what I desire
>>7795262
William Gass is exactly who you are looking for.
Marquez or Joyce
virginia woolf
kazuo ishiguro
>>7795794
Please stop pretending you've read Gass.
>>7796231
lol, sorry: I confused him with Gaddis
Is Gaddis that is crap.
I have never read Gass. Where should I start?
>>7796271
Gaddis isn't crap, but whatever. I recommend you start with his first novel, Omensetter's Luck.
>>7796285
I liked this:
“In general, I would think that at present prose writers are much in advance of the poets. In the old days, I read more poetry than prose, but now it is in prose where you find things being put together well, where there is great ambition, and equal talent. Poets have gotten so careless, it is a disgrace. You can’t pick up a page. All the words slide off.”
― William H. Gass
>>7796303
Based gass
>>7796303
As always, on point.
>>7795262
wow you sound pretentious as shit
>>7795262
Proust in a la recherche du temps perdu
Nadja by André Breton
Le Grand Meaulnes by alain-fournier
those are the exemple I use when trying to show poetry in the novel in essays in college
>>7796330
No. I just know how to explain what I like. You probably have a very different taste and wants to attack me but don’t know how to do it, so you just say that I am pretentious. You probably have inside your brain a connection between liking artistic prose and being pretentious, a very common connection to a lot of people.
Be honest when you want to criticize someone, say what you really think. What is pretentious in my post?
I hate those people that come here to fight and offend others.
Marquez and Mia Couto
I'm currently reading Lolita and it's weird how similar to Pynchon it feels. Guess Ruggles really paid attention on those classes.
>>7796626
>I'm currently reading Lolita and it's weird how similar to Pynchon it feels.
Wut? Pynchon is a mess when compared to Nabokov's metaphoric prose. Maybe Pynchon is similar in the fact that he also uses humor, but his humor is more dirty and low than that of Nabokov.
>>7796636
>his humor is more dirty and low than that of Nabokov.
I don't think you can get dirtier than making jokes about little girls uteri.
>>7796338
Three overrated hacks, congratulations!
Tu aurais pu cité Céline, seul auteur à ajouter une dimension poétique à l'argot.
>>7796664
I am not talking about the subject matter, but the way the jokes are made. Pynchon is more adept of a crude language and bodily function jokes, while Nabokov is witty and elegant even when making jokes about very degenerate aspects of existence.
>>7796686
I'd say the prose is more verbose, but they both make the situations feel just as ridiculous and are very intricate. But now that you say it like that, you're probably right and OP was asking for something else. I was hasty.
Andrei Bely
Georges Bataille
Jean Genet
Jack Kerouac ( Big Sur or Old Angel Midnight )
Juan Goytisolo
Virginia Woolf
Thomas Pynchon
Zadie Smith
Gabriel Garcia Marquez (YES EVEN IN TRANSLATION TO ENGLISH)
>>7795378
>>7795425
>>7795878
I agree. I'm finally off work, and I'll post some ones that are maybe more what OP is looking for. Here's some from The Sound and the Fury:
"A pair of jaybirds came up from nowhere, whirled up on the blast like gaudy scraps of cloth or paper and lodged in the mulberries, where they sung in raucous tilt and recover, screaming into the wind that ripped their harsh cries onward and away like scraps of paper or of cloth in turn."
and
"When the visitor rose to speak he sounded like a white man. His voice was level and cold. [. . .] Then a voice said, 'Brethren.'
The preacher had not moved. His arm lay yet across the desk, and he still held that pose while the voice died in sonorous echoes between the walls. It was as different as day and dark from his former tone, with a sad, timbrous quality like an alto horn, sinking into their hearts and speaking there again when it had ceased in fading and cumulate echoes.
'Brethren and sisteren,' it said again. The preacher removed his arm and he began to walk back and forth before the desk, his hands clasped behind him, a meagre figure, hunched over upon itself like that of one long immured in striving with the implacable earth, “I got the recollection and the blood of the Lamb!” He tramped steadily back and forth beneath the twisted paper and the Christmas bell, hunched, his hands clasped behind him. He was like a worn small rock whelmed by the successive waves of his voice. With his body he seemed to feed the voice that, succubus like, had fleshed its teeth in him. And the congregation seemed to watch with its own eyes while the voice consumed him, until he was nothing and they were nothing and there was not even a voice but instead their hearts were speaking to one another in chanting measures beyond the need for words, so that when he came to rest against the reading desk, his monkey face lifted and his whole attitude that of a serene, tortured crucifix that transcended its shabbiness and insignificance and made it of no moment, a long moaning expulsion of breath rose from them, and a woman’s single soprano: “Yes, Jesus!”
As the scudding day passed overhead the dingy windows glowed and faded in ghostly retrograde. A car passed along the road outside, laboring in the sand, died away. Dilsey sat bolt upright, her hand on Ben’s knee. Two tears slid down her fallen cheeks, in and out of the myriad coruscations of immolation and abnegation and time."
Bruno Schulz srs
>>7795425
a little precious
>>7798599
You know, I was reading some essays about him and he really seems to be a great prose-poet. Can you quote some of his work? (Also, I remember he was even a kind of scientist of the metaphor)
>>7795262
Lautréamont
>Les Chants de Maldoror
>>7797783
>"A pair of jaybirds came up from nowhere, whirled up on the blast like gaudy scraps of cloth or paper and lodged in the mulberries, where they sung in raucous tilt and recover, screaming into the wind that ripped their harsh cries onward and away like scraps of paper or of cloth in turn."
beautiful
Not sure whether to classify the prose as 'beautiful' but the imagery in Heart of Darkness is incredibly vivid. Its also a short story which seems to fit your description.
Read the essays by Peter Wessel Zapffe, especially the ones on mountaineering, like 'Stetind'. Not sure how many of them are translated though
