Who are the most beautiful stylists in the English language?

Chuck Tingle

>>8353480

Nabokov.

David Foster Wallace

>>8353480
Sir Thomas Browne and Walter Pater are essential.

>>8353480
Didn't Churchill write most of his own speeches?

Milton and Wordsworth were masters of poetic style (even if Wordsworth lacked the imagination of contemporaries like Coleridge or Blake)

In terms of the novel i would say that on opposite ends of the mastery of style spectrum you have Wilde, who uses florid and dense language to paint gorgeous images, and Hemingway, who manages to create incredible stories due to his control of an almost childishly basic syntax.

Gaddis

>>8353531
English looks like garbage when you have authors who spoke it as their second language and they are in discussions like these.

>>8353572
More like shows Nabokovs brilliance

File: icebergslim_toppage.jpg (187KB, 940x560px) Image search: [Google]

187KB, 940x560px

Iceberg Slim.

'Stylist' implies prose, right? If you're including Shakespeare though then just pick from the canonical poets.

>>8353600
nabokov is bad though

He wrote lolita as an anti-freud tract but it ends up being extremely freudian.

Thomas Wolfe.

>>8353600
Conrad on writing in English:

>He explained that, though he was familiar with French from childhood, "I would have been afraid to attempt expression in a language so perfectly 'crystallized'."

>In a 1915 conversation with American sculptor Jo Davidson, as he posed for his bust, in response to Davidson's question Conrad said: "Ah… to write French you have to know it. English is so plastic—if you haven't got a word you need you can make it, but to write French you have to be an artist like Anatole France."

>>8353572

It can be done with any language, if you know it well. Nabokov learned English since he was young, and English is, I admit, a language whose learning is simpler. But if you try you can learn Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Latin, and many other idioms that flourished in Europe, especially if starting from childhood.

What makes Nabokov a great prose writer, however, was not a magnificent ear for English, but his great metaphoric and poetic ability. He could be also good in Portuguese, for example, had he learned the language: it is more a question of imagery than sound.

That is why poets who are great with metaphors translate well into any language (Shakespeare, for example), while poets of pure sound suffer more (Pushkin is mostly loved only by Russians because of this).

>>8353609
>nabokov is bad though

Why do so few people realize this? Nabokov is shit. Everything he writes is overwrought to the point of becoming masturbatory

>>8353696

I like an excess of metaphors and images, the reason why I love Shakespeare. Nabokov is his disciple, and that's why I appreciate his work.

>>8353480
Chapman's Translations of the Homeric epics is amongst the best English.

>>8353480
Bret. Easton. Ellis.

End thread.

>>8353696
Shit taste. Nabokov rules. So does masturbation.

Browne
Pater
Hazlit
Melville
Joyce

For prose.

>>8353926
Swift and Macaulay as well.

>>8353606
Stylist doesn't necessarily imply prose. Poets can be stylists too.

David Foster Wallace

>>8353480
deef W

Pound

Honestly, Harold Bloom has beautiful prose, but you have to already like reading criticism and theory (99% of which is written in the most dreadfully passive rhet comp 301 style) to care. likewise for Fredric jameson

>>8354177
There is a lot of very nicely written criticism.

>>8353609
>He wrote lolita as an anti-freud tract

I think you know this isn't actually true, so I'm wondering why you posted it.

>>8353696
>Everything he writes is overwrought to the point of becoming masturbatory

Nabokov was meticulous. You can make the argument that his works are constructed and laid down so precisely and perfectly that they lack something organic, but even then you have to appreciate his talent for narrative and his insight into the mind of the reader.