Transcendent Prose/Verse Styles

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20 y/o STEM-lord here,

I've read 89 books, plays, and poetry collections in the last year or so, 69 classics and some non-fiction.

Here's my rating:

1. Milton - Paradise Lost > sustained verse

2. Shakespeare - various exchanges and soliloquys (in his later plays) > phrase-coinage and metaphors

3. McCarthy - Blood Meridian and Suttree > rhythmic alternations of sparse and rich prose

4. Pynchon - Gravity's Rainbow > Shakespeare in prose

Personal Honourable Mention. Xenophon - Cyropaedia (Walter Miller translation) > b/c of a personal fascination with Cyrus

On the Fence. Delillo - Underworld > brief flashes of transcendence, probably needs some time to pass so that his descriptions become descriptions of the "historical" rather than what's actually going on right now.

Was wondering if anyone agrees with this?

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I put a premium on style because after a while I started to realize that alot of what constituted "great" literature was just good, but not great prose (by today's standards - not by the standards of their day) - mixed in with alot of fucking platitudes and "insights" and shallow levels of interpretation designed to appeal to the mass-market.

Examples:

The Russians - you can see what I think of them from the pic. They're not very good in-translation.

Divine Comedy (in-translation) was pretty good as a work of verse, but its real strength lay in its structure, setting, and the intertwining of allegory throughout. Wish I could read it in Italian - but I'm not going to learn an entire language just to read one work.

Homer might as well be read alongside "Game of Thrones" if not for the retarded amounts of references to his epics found throughout the entirety of the Western canon. Aeneid (Dryden) is an improvement though.

I prefer the translations of the Upanishads and Bhagavad Gita over Plato or Aristotle - and when reviewed in hindsight, the ideas entertained by the Vedic Indians are still applicable even today on the cosmic scale, whereas Plato seemed like he was just pulling unsubstantiated things out of his ass (and there's even some evidence that Plato and his successors took their best ideas from the Upanishads).

Other notable post-modern authors are frequently annoying to read since their works are typically laden with platitudes and triteness glued together by dry, workmanlike prose (often pleasant to read, but nothing that evokes a visceral emotional and/or mental response). Very few exceptions to this rule even with the "best" of them beyond a few paragraphs here and there - and I think it's awful how Infinite Jest has influenced an entire generation of budding authors.