I this beautiful prose is definitely something to strive for--but where I think I differ from a lot of literary fiction readers and a certain subset of SFF fans is that I don't believe prose should be beautiful at the expense of clarity. The meaning is primary for me, and I think prose should elucidate rather than obscure it (that doesn't mean fiction can't be challenging, or that I think authors should avoid big words--but if I have to spend 5 minutes untangling the grammar of a pretty but muddled sentence, that's not the kind of challenge I seek in fiction--I want challenging IDEAS, not dense thickets of purple prose that could have used an editor).

Rosemary Sutcliff is my gold standard for prose that is heartbreakingly beautiful and emotionally complex, yet utterly clear. Even when she writes a paragraph-long sentence, I never get lost or puzzled by her grammar, or feel like she's using specific words solely to be Deep, as I sometimes feel with more purple writers.

(I'm also...a little hesitant about "beautiful". Is Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried "beautiful" prose? Can one have beautiful prose about something as ugly as his topics? And yet--it's a masterful, effective book, whose style works perfectly for the emotional subject matter.)