Why is this opening passage so reviled? It reads nicely to me.

>>8635435
It is kitsch.2 The blatant "This is taking place in London." does not help either, it could have been interwoven into the rest of the text much nicer. Plus it's a meme. You dip.

(2: of low artistic merit, despite being of high artisanic one; generic)

>>8635435
By modern standards it is jejune.

Wow Baron Edward Bulwer-Lytton came up with all kinds of memes: He coined the phrases "the great unwashed" "pursuit of the almighty dollar", "the pen is mightier than the sword", "dweller on the threshold", and the well-known opening line "It was a dark and stormy night".

>>8635456
you should put your footnotes in brackets.[1]

[1]: The reason for this is that it doesn't throw you out of the flow of reading as much if it is immediately clear that it's not a misclick on a number key.

>>8635532
Thank, my mistake. [1]

[1]: The mistake stems from me not knowing that footnotes are re-formatted to normal text once the post is sent.

>>8635456
>>8635459
I simply do not see how this is the case. If this was in any book today, no one would think twice about it.

>>8635593
Describing the weather in a verbose fashion is the gold standard for kitsch.

>>8635603
So how are you supposed to describe the weather?

>It rained on the london streets. The torches flickered.

It is not as evocative.

>>8635593
Are you seriously going to tell me you've never heard 'it was a dark and stormy night' used outside of this text? It has become a cliche. You wouldn't see it used today because it would never get past an editor (except maybe as a joke).

>>8635644
Furthermore, descriptions of weather are ancillary to the story. You wouldn't even say 'it rained on the london streets' you would just say 'it was raining' and move on to describe your characters in action.

>>8635644
This was a popular writer in his time the same way John Green is today. So a lot of the reason that passage is a meme is because it represents the worst of popular tastes.

>>8635644
>So how are you supposed to describe the weather?
The point is: if describing the weather does not add anything of value to your text, don't describe it.

>>8635697
It describes atmosphere. It puts an image in the readers mind.

It's just because it became a meme. Many writers thought of as "great" have written much worse

>>8635735
I think this is correct. It's not one of the great opening lines of literature but otherwise unremarkable.

>>8635435
The
>for it is in London
is hella clunky. I'd say the rest is more unfashionable than bad.

>>8635659
>Furthermore, descriptions of weather are ancillary to the story. You wouldn't even say 'it rained on the london streets' you would just say 'it was raining' and move on to describe your characters in action.

>>8635697

You guys would kill Shakespeare in the shell.

>>8635435
>for it is in London that our scene lies
It actually wouldn't be that bad or noticeable if it weren't for this melodramatic addition.

>You guys would kill Shakespeare in the shell.
Anyone can argue against or for anything in writing, we're talking about if it gets popular or not and Shakespeare and most /lit/ authors were popular at the time they existed or just got promoted by /lit/ profs for years.

It was some /lit/ profs that spent 12 years recommending dylan for the nobel for lit.
Good, clear, popular, money-making, and fun are all different things in a work. You could debate endlessly that sentences should be shorter, you shouldn't spend time with something like this or that, this character is useless and this passage, plot, subplot, or description doesn't fit in with the story.
In the end you've already decided what you think is important and cool, you're just trying to convince others it's true too.
How is that not the case?

>>8635435
>It was then a dark and stormy night, the rain falling like limewire until the winds again tossed it up above London's streets, nigh-shattering the shingles and tormenting the flames hidden in the streetlights.

>>8635435
Because the passage has zero human interest.

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>>8636056
>It was then a dark and stormy night, the rain falling like limewire until the winds again tossed it up above London's streets, nigh-shattering the shingles and tormenting the flames hidden in the streetlights

Is this a better opening line???

"Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting."

I prefer authors like Shakespeare, Melville and Nabokov to authors like Hemingway, so I don’t see the OP phrase as that bad.

However, if the author keeps making great descriptions without adding any touch of humanity to it, then I start to find it boring. You do not even need to actually mention real human beings or characters, but at least use verbs of human action or personification of lifeless things.

Also, I think that poetic and flowery prose/poetry are actually quite interesting, but they need to serve a purpose, to be inserted into a story, to be adapted to characters and the demands of the work.

There is also another problem: if you are going for a poetic work you must be really good, you must be inventive and able to transform old clichés and create new metaphors, new similes, new epithets.

>>8635778
Shakespeare wrote plays, he wrote in dialogue, not in prose. Entirely different things, fucking retard.

>>8636885

I know that you asshole.

But people like the quoted ones and like you would read excerpts and sketches of a play written today by a non-famous young author with the same talent and metaphoric boldness of Shakespeare and say to him that it is "pretentious" and "ineffective" and that his text is filled with "mere adornment."

Recently an anon posted a little-known passage of Henry VI (a magnificent speech) in a thread of criticism and some other Anons started to shit on the passage and calling it too flowery and pretentious.

Fuck you.

>>8636946
no one is as good as shakespeare today, the man had a super computer for a brain

>>8636976
>the man had a super computer for a brain

can you say more?

>>8636976
Was shakespeare's brain really that impressive? I wonder if it contained some uncommon features. What do you think that was more impressive in his mind?

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>>8636976
>no one is as good as shakespeare today, the man had a super computer for a brain


Can you explain what do you mean?