how closely do good prose writers pay attention to language?

Some prose writers are interested in prosody....others aren't.

Sebald, for example, puts an awful lot of work into the rhythm of his sentences.

>>9877934
well that sure wasn't helpful at all and had no reason for being posted whatsoever

prosody is kind of overrated when it comes to good prose imo. I like a strong sense of diction and sentence structure.

>>9877929

Some do, some don't. There's no general description that matches all good prose writers. Nabokov was tone deaf and his poetry sucked, but somehow his prose has great rhythm. Joyce was a crappy (worse than Nabokov) poet, but obviously he's essentially the best.
Melville I think is less concerned with stresses and unstresses and moreso goes for the words used by Shakespeare and generally that higher poetic plane of writing.

> "Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing—straight up leaps thy apotheosis!"

It's rhythmically very interesting, nice use of dactyls towards the end, but I think that it was subconscious rather than him going for doing those stresses directly. A side effect of writing in such high language, you could say. Long and powerful words more often lend themselves to strong stress patterns. Let them do the work and get out of the way.

>>9878117
Joyce wasn't that bad a poet :/

>>9878173

His poetry would've been forgotten within a few months of publishing if he weren't a great novelist

If you're a writer and don't care about rhythm, please burn the despicable trash you call your "work".

>>9878117
thanks, lad. good post

>>9878520
thanks for the thanks, but I could've written a better post about it. I just didn't feel like it I guess.

It's worth reading Melville's poetry, btw, if you haven't. It's not amazing, but it's decent and is written not dissimilarly to the high-poetic sections of Moby-Dick. He has an epic-length poem that nobody reads that should shed light on his poetic leanings.

>>9878177
its forgotten anyway - where do you buy Joyce poetry?

>>9879152
I really like pomes penyeach

Yes Joyce works in sections. So chapter 2 of A Portrait has around 8 sections. These range from two to ~ twelve pages in length. Each section is like a poem. And each paragraph like a canto or some other poetic equivalent. Of all the writers I've read Joyce is most attuned to the rise and fall of his sentences. Study these two examples, but do so in context. That way you get the full affect.

>But when he had sung his song and withdrawn into a snug corner of the room he began to taste the joy of his loneliness. The mirth, which in the beginning of the evening had seemed to him false and trivial, was like a soothing air to him, passing gaily by his senses, hiding from other eyes the feverish agitation of his blood while through the circling of the dancers and amid the music and laughter her glance travelled to his corner, flattering, taunting, searching, exciting his heart.

>They seemed to listen, he on the upper step and she on the lower. She came up to his step many times and went down to hers again between their phrases and once or twice stood close beside him for some moments on the upper step, forgetting to go down, and then went down. His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether in life or revery, he had heard their tale before. He saw her urge her vanities, her fine dress and sash and long black stockings, and knew that he had yielded to them a thousand times. Yet a voice within him spoke above the noise of his dancing heart, asking him would he take her gift to which he had only to stretch out his hand. And he remembered the day when he and Eileen had stood looking into the hotel grounds, watching the waiters running up a trail of bunting on the flagstaff and the fox terrier scampering to and fro on the sunny lawn and how, all of a sudden, she had broken out into a peal of laughter and had run down the sloping curve of the path. Now, as then, he stood listlessly in his place, seemingly a tranquil watcher of the scene before him.

Honestly it's at bottom a question of how "responsive" the prose is, rather than how much it takes after poetic conventions.