'The Aesthetic Blush'

One of my favorite essays was written about prose by a poet. No paradox there. Apart from the strictures of meter and rhyme, there’s no good reason prose can’t be composed as musically and concisely as poetry. Years ago, Dave Lull sent me a link to Donald Justice’s “The Prose Sublime,” first published in the Michigan Quarterly Review in 1988 and collected in A Donald Justice Reader: Selected Poetry and Prose (1991). It’s an essay I periodically reread, in part because Justice cites the occasional excellence of the prose of Sherwood Anderson, an early enthusiasm of mine. I also like that he explicitly rejects “purple prose,” the flowery stuff soft-headed writers think is poetic. One quality of good prose is that it adheres, like lichen to a rock, to precise thought. I want to point out the witty subtitle Justice gives his essay: “Or, the Deep Sense of Things Belonging Together, Inexplicably.” Justice is suggesting that our expectations of prose are modest or even nonexistent compared…