Swinburne is often a very discerning critic in spite of his penchant for purple prose.

His persecuted characters bleed purple prose, and he persistently confuses an assault on the nerves with a cry from the heart.

The things, you say / Your purple prose just gives you away / The things, you say / You're unbelievable

An antibiological bias […] was stimulated by a flood of popular and scholarly books in the 1960s and 1970s (some awash in deep purple prose) saying that male domination was natural and inevitable.

Purple prose

Meaning

Noun