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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/24734
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I was looking for some writers who are famous for their rich in metaphors, poetic style (to study and learn from them). Surprisingly, Google had failed me, locating only one [page](http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/forum/showthread.php/61708-Famous-highly-metaphorical-writers) with a relevant question (and no answers).

To be more specific, the metaphors I'm interested in are neither large-scale creative elements (such as "the Castle in the novel is a metaphor for religion") nor extended metaphors that span a paragraph or more.

I'm looking for writers with well developed style, dense with sentence-level metaphors and other rhetorical devices (but probably not similes-only style). I'm not looking for "purple prose", but rather for something clearly readable and yet poetic. It's a bit difficult to to provide good examples, but to give some idea:

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> The night was windy. The contours of the houses flew away like phantoms, staggering and shaking in the turbulent air.

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> ...conversations, through the sunny cellophane of which not very appetizing frustrations can be readily distinguished

(To narrow it down a bit more, I'm looking for writers from the 20th and the 21st centuries using modern English)

I'm asking for a list of writers and not for a list of books because hopefully the whole body of work of such a writer will be useful and enjoyable to study.

EDIT: To clarify, I don't have anything against similes. Obviously, any master of metaphor will probably be using a lot of similes too, often in the same sentence - just as in the first example above (where "like phantoms" is a simile and "flew" and "staggering" are metaphors). It's just that similes aren't my primary interest here, and a writer who uses /mostly/ similes and rarely or never metaphors would not be a good example for studying the art of metaphor.

Original score: 1