Purple Prose | A Much Misunderstood Literary Concept

Do an Internet search on the topic, and you will realize that there seems to be consensus on purple prose being a variation of bad writing. Most descriptions and definitions of purple prose that you come across seem to suggest that it should be avoided and is a mark of weak or inexperienced writers. 

It is portrayed as little more than writers overusing adjectives and adverbs in an attempt to sound like the accomplished writers they admire. However, this is a mistaken definition. Purple prose is not simply bad and over-descriptive writing.

Traditionally, it has been used to describe writing that can be referred to as prose poems, that is, prose written with the cadence and flowery language we associate with modern poetry or free verse. A good example of purple prose is James Joyce’s Ulysses (published in 1920). Here is an excerpt from the poem: 

Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding land and the awaking mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat and shaking his head. Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak.

There is a lot of overwriting in this passage by Joyce in the beginning pages of Ulysses. However, it can hardly be described as bad writing. For example, the character’s face from the perspective of Stephen Dedalus is described as “shaking gurgling” and “equine in its length.” Is there any real point to these descriptions? 

Ulysses is a modernist prose poem that focuses on the tedium of everyday life in Ireland, using a handful of characters to illustrate that fact. James Joyces makes it a point to portray all the lurid details and minutiae of lives that are ordinary and uneventful. In short, much of the writing comes across as a kind of picturesque navel gazing — for better or for worse.

So there is a point to the overwriting. Now, this doesn’t mean that writing of this sort is beyond criticism. Virginia Woolf (1922) famously described the book as “a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.” Such criticism is ironic considering that Woolf herself has been described as writing prose that is too self-involved or self-indulgent.

In this article, I discuss the meaning of purple prose and the controversy surrounding its popular definition on the Internet. Lastly, I provide a few examples of purple prose and purple writing from Virginia Woolf, Derek Walcott, and James Joyce. 

Restored image of Virginia Woold from 1902.

What is purple prose? 

Purple prose is deliberately flowery writing, defined by a mastery of poetic cadence. Many would disagree with this definition. If the Internet is anything to go by, the majority of people would disagree with it. 

The term appears to be mostly defined as bad over descriptive writing. Here is how Scribbr defines purple prose: 

Purple prose is a term used to describe writing that is excessively flowery in its style. It is prose that draws attention to itself by its stylistic excesses to the extent that they get in the way of the meaning.

QuillBot, similarly, has a negative opinion of the literary concept. Here is what they have to say about it: 

Purple prose is an excessive and flowery writing style that draws attention to itself, pulling the reader out of the story. It is characterized by long-winded sentences, unnecessary adjectives, and flamboyant vocabulary.

I think the confusion lies in the fact that purple prose is being confused or mistaken with florid writing. This is writing that uses an excessive amount of adjectives and descriptions, without contributing anything to the overall intended effect of the author.

However, there is one more element missing in florid or lurid writing that separates it from purple prose: that is, the poetic cadence that we associate with modern poetry, especially free verse. Free verse does not rely on traditional poetic rhyme or meter. 

Instead, it relies on the ability of a poet to execute lines that follow the cadences and rhythms of modern conversational language, without coming across as banal or ordinary. Before we elaborate on this, let’s take a quick look at the history of the term “purple prose.” 

Where did the term originate? 

The term purple prose is based on the writing of the Roman poet Horace, also known as Quintus Horatius Flaccus, who lived from 65 to 8 BC. The work in reference is Ars Poetica (lines 14–21): 

Your opening shows great promise, and yet flashy

purple patches; as when describing

a sacred grove, or the altar of Diana,

or a stream meandering through fields,

or the river Rhine, or a rainbow;

but this was not the place for them. If you can realistically render

a cypress tree, would you include one when commissioned to paint

a sailor in the midst of a shipwreck?

Horace, here, seems to be criticizing poets and writers who place too much emphasis on elements that do not add to the story. When he talks about “flashy purple patches” he is referring to flowery writing describing “poetic subjects,” such as “a sacred grove, or the altar of Diana.” 

His criticism then should be applied to flowery writing that is out of place when compared to the rest of the story. It is not necessarily bad writing in and of itself. This is so especially when he talks about realistically rendering a cypress tree. We would not expect bad writing to realistically render anything. 

But Horace was writing more than 2000 years ago. How on earth do we interpret the meaning of purple prose today? Purple prose, as far as I am concerned, is mostly concerned with modernist literature. The best example of it would be prose poetry of the sort exemplified by James Joyce. 

We also should not be misled by the word “prose” in the term. It can also be used to describe a number of free verse poems. Again, I distinguish purple prose from other forms of florid or lurid writing, examples of which are given on the Internet as proof of purple prose.

Purple prose sets itself apart from florid writing because of its mastery of modern poetic cadence in either prose or free verse. Nonetheless, this doesn’t always save it from rightfully being described as bad or less-than-ideal writing.

Modern poetic cadence  in purple prose

Here is an example of this modern cadence from T. S. Eliot’s poem, “Gerontion” (published in 1920): 

Here I am, an old man in a dry month,

Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.

I was neither at the hot gates

Nor fought in the warm rain

Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,

Bitten by flies, fought.

There is a certain musicality in these lines. However, Eliot relies on modern speech patterns and broken variations of regular meters. One can notice that the first line is mostly iambic pentameter. The rhythm of the lines depends on repetition, short phrases separated by commas, and inversion or anastrophe. 

For example, the word “fought” at the end of the sixth line would have ordinarily been placed in between “nor” and “knee” in Line 5. Anastrophe is a literary device used here to both enhance the rhythm of the poem and to reflect the disjointed thinking of the speaking persona, who is growing old and possibly losing the mental ability to think coherently.

Now this poem is not exactly purple. Purple prose is defined by flowery and descriptive writing, which is the exact opposite of T.S. Eliot’s dry and straightforward style. However, it does display the modern cadence we associate with free verse or modern poetry. In the following, we provide examples of purple writing.

Examples of purple prose

Our first example is not even actually prose but is from the poet Derek Walcott in his poem “The Star Apple Kingdom” (published in 1979). 

1. Walcott, “Star Apple Kingdom”:

She was as beautiful as a stone in the sunrise,

her voice had the gutturals of machine guns

across khaki deserts where the cactus flower

detonates like grenades, her sex was the slit throat    

of an Indian, her hair had the blue-black sheen of the crow.

She was a black umbrella blown inside out                 

by the wind of revolution, La Madre Dolorosa,

a black rose of sorrow, a black mine of silence,

raped wife, empty mother, Aztec virgin

transfixed by arrows from a thousand guitars,

a stone full of silence, which, if it gave tongue

to the tortures done in the name of the Father,

would curdle the blood of the marauding wolf,

the fountain of generals, poets, and cripples

who danced without moving over their graves

with each revolution; her Caesarean was stitched

by the teeth of machine guns . . .

Here, Derek Walcott is describing a personification of a Caribbean or Latin American revolution. He does so by using a never-ending string of beautiful images that are associated with the Caribbean landscape and Caribbean history. 

In particular, the line “her voice had the gutturals of machine guns / across khaki deserts where the cactus flower / detonates like grenades.” The description of “khaki deserts” simultaneously describes the deserts of Latin American countries like Mexico and the military clothing one associates with revolutionaries like Castro.

The definition of purple prose that I object to describes it as writing that is overly ornate and that disrupts the narrative flow. However, this cannot be said of this poem. The entirety of Star Apple Kingdom is filled with this ornate type of writing. The floweriness and ornateness is the standard. 

The flood of images, symbols, and descriptions that one finds in the passage aim to “evoke” the immense tragedy and violence of Caribbean and Latin American history in terms of the injustices associated with colonialism and genocide. This becomes especially graphic in lines like “her sex was the slit throat / of an Indian.” Therefore, we can say the over description serves its purpose.

Our second example is from Virginia Woolf’s A Sketch of the Past (1939).

2. Woolf, A Sketch of the Past:  

Oak apples, ferns with clusters of seeds on their backs, the regatta, Charlie Pearce, the click of the garden gate, the ants swarming on the hot front door step; buying tintacks; sailing; the smell of Halestown Bog; splits with Cornish cream for tea in the farm house at Trevail; the floor of the sea changing colour at lessons; old Mr Wolstenholme in his beehive chair; the spotted elm leaves on the lawn; the rooks cawing as they passed over the house in the early morning; the escallonia leaves showing their grey undersides; the arc in the air, like the pip of an orange, when the powder magazine at Hayle blew up; the boom of the buoy—those for some reason come uppermost at the moment in my mind thinking of St Ives—an incongruous miscellaneous catalogue, little corks that mark a sunken net.

This passage assaults us with a train of images from the poet’s memory of her childhood home at St. Ives. While Walcott’s poem featured a catalogue of images of colonial torture and horror evoking the history of the Americas, we have here something more nostalgic. 

The writer is trying to bring her childhood back to life by providing dozens of details of her childhood home, using a long string of descriptions, images, and memories in association with that home, Talland House. At first glance, it may seem excessive. However, Woolf is trying to represent the real nature of memory and nostalgia, which often doesn’t occur in a linear order. In that regard, she also achieves her intended effect.

Now, purple prose doesn’t always work. There is such a thing as bad purple prose. We will also rely on Virginia Woolf for our example. The passage in question is from The Years (published in 1937).

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3. Woolf, The Years:

The fine rain, the gentle rain, poured equally over the mitred and the bareheaded with an impartiality which suggested that the god of rain, if there were a god, was thinking Let it not be restricted to the very wise, the very great, but let all breathing kind, the munchers and chewers, the ignorant, the unhappy, those who toil in the furnace making innumerable copies of the same pot, those who bore red hot minds through contorted letters, and also Mrs Jones in the alley, share my bounty.

According to Theodore Dalrymple, in his highly critical article of Virginia Woolf, this passage is simply a failed attempt to imitate Matthew 5:45: “He maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.” What Matthew does in two lines, Woolf wasn’t able to achieve in seven.

The passage fails for a number of reasons. One of the main ones is the poor choice in phrasing juxtapositions. For example, “the mitred and the bareheaded” or “very great” with “munchers and chewers” (whatever that means). Describing humanity as “breathing kind” almost pushes the passage to the level of parody. 

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Cite this EminentEdit Article

Antoine, M. (2025, June 18). Purple Prose | A Much Misunderstood Literary Concept. EminentEdit. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/purple-prose