In the 60s, there was a culture of pushing the established envelope as far as it would go... and also of using lots of mind altering substances. Having read neither of these mentioned authors, I cannot say which of these they were doing... LOL
I don't know about Poe, but Hemingway was very successful financially. Most of his novels were best-sellers and he was able to afford a pretty darn luxurious lifestyle. Faulkner did not use flowery language? Hmm. Try reading the first couple of pages of Absalom, Absalom sometime. Or the descriptions in "Spotted Horses": a "gray woman in the gray sunbonnet and dress, her clasped and motionless hands on her lap resembling a gnarl of pallid and drowned roots from a drained swamp"; or Tull, with the "sedate and innocent blue of his eyes above the month-old corn-silk beard which concealed most of his abraded face and which gave him an air of incredible and paradoxical dissoluteness, not as though at last and without warning he had appeared in the sight of his fellowmen in his true character, but as if an old Italian portrait of a child saint had been defaced by a vicious and idle boy", etc. Faulkner was a great overwriter and used tons of flowery language. Open almost any of his works at almost any page and you'll find examples.
no, it's not 'flowery' at all, imo... just truly great wordsmithery! klk... from that sample about the tree i would guess english is not your first language... or that you need to brush up on basic grammar, since there are flaws that can't be explained away by trying to sound 'literary'...
I think it can all be explained by an attempt to sound literary. It reads rather like some stuff by John Barth that I've read (ahd his first language was English!). The trouble is, that sort of experimentation flared up in the 1960s and fizzled out again as a dead end. That extract doesn't look as if it's going to rekindle it. The trouble is that if you are trying to be original you need to have a pretty good idea of what has already been tried. And all those who have succeeded in making a name for themselves in experimental fiction -- Joyce, Barth and so on -- have first demonstrated their skill with conventional prose.