Full confession and unashamed assertion: I like maximalist prose when it’s done right, when it’s organic to the writer, natural to his or her style. I like adjectives and adverbs and all the rest of the words we’re supposedly supposed to cut from our writing in the interest of producing clear, sleek, neutered—sorry, neutral—prose.

In Ray Bradbury’s classic 1948 story “Pillar of Fire,” a man named Lantry who died in the twentieth century wakes up four hundred years later in a thoroughly sanitized and imaginatively flattened future world where death is hidden and anything that suggests darkness or fear is policed and suppressed. Discovering this, at one point he goes to a library to check on the fate of supernatural literature in such a society. He asks the librarian if they house any books by Poe, or Machen, or Bierce, or Derleth. He also asks about Lovecraft. The reply for each is the same: These were all part of the great burning a century earlier, and good riddance, too. Later, as Lantry reflects and fumes over this galling travesty, one of his infuriated thoughts is, “You destroyers of Edgar Allan Poe and fine big-worded Lovecraft, you burner of Hallowe'en masks and destroyer of pumpkin jack-o-lanterns!”

I first read this story in junior high school, several years before I read Lovecraft, and I think Bradbury’s descriptive phrase, issuing from the mouth of the story’s protagonist, may have been the first time I ever heard of him: “fine big-worded Lovecraft.” For me, that set the tone through which my later expectations were both shaped and fulfilled. Lovecraft with his big words and ornate style is indeed fine. Very fine, indeed, with no remedial application of Procrustean principles needed for his prose. Forget Edmund Wilson’s famous 1945 broadside against Lovecraft in The New Yorker, where he laid into Lovecraft for supposed stylistic excess, an overuse of descriptive words like “blasphemous” and “eldritch.” Wilson was speaking from his own unsupported bias. Fine, big-worded Lovecraft knew what he was doing.

What was true of Lovecraft is true of many other writers as well—including you and me. The work of many fine writers contains a full complement of adjectives and even, gasp, adverbs, despite prominent figures from Elmore Leonard to Stephen King to Kingsley Amis being lined up against them. Good writing is not all one way. Sometimes, for some writers and occasions, good writing emerges as spare, sleek, and lean. At other times, for other writers and occasions, it emerges as dense, wordy, complex, and ornate. And the latter, no less than the former, when deployed rightly—meaning organically and skillfully, as the natural flowering and expression of the writer’s spirit of creative genius—is glorious just as it is, with no need for any change, which could only diminish it.