The novelist-poet Boris Pasternak said that poetry makes itself from “the relationship between the sounds and the meanings of words.” I think that prose makes itself the same way, if you will allow “sounds” to include syntax and the large motions, connections, and shapes of narrative. There is a relationship, a reciprocity, between the words and the images, ideas, and emotions evoked by those words: the stronger that relationship, the stronger the work. To believe that you can achieve meaning or feeling without coherent, integrated patterning of the sounds, the rhythms, the sentence
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