He says potato, I say potahto

My husband, reading an article in Men's Journal about trekking across Greenland, asked what I thought of  these sentences:
"There is undeniable poetry in the violent and chaotic expression of nature's forces. The drift galloping over the ice resonates of Valkyries from a wild avant-garde ballet. Backlit by the sun's low rays, the sheet of liquid smoke glows like a cloudscape time-lapse photograph. And what could be seen as a frigid and threatening environment turns into an ethereal dance: delicate, evocative, and graceful."

Individual phrases caught my ear. I liked the liquid smoke image, I told him, and the word cloudscape, and the ethereal dance. Maybe not the Valkyries. What did he think? "I lost the story in the words," he said. "I wanted to know what happened to the trekkers, and all that description got in my way."

When I looked closely at the passage, I had to agree that it was overdone. The landscape is a ballet, a photograph, and, again, a dance. Modifiers trip over each other: "cloudscape time-lapse photograph" is hard enough to say (too many accented syllables),  harder to process quickly since words that are usually nouns turn out to be used here as adjectives. And the word "resonate" should, in my humble opinion, be retired; it must be exhausted from overuse. Editing this passage would bring out its beauty. As St. Exupery said, "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

But the bigger point I want to make here is the widely varying preferences of readers. What strikes me as poetic, worth a second read, strikes Ray as obfuscation. Most people read for only content; they want to know what happens next, period. Some, like Ray, will occasionally appreciate a well crafted sentence, but it's not what they need or look for. For a few, like me, a memorable style (of which there are innumerable types, not just poetic, of course) is the sine qua non of the books we call great. You say potato, I say potahto. Aren't we lucky to have books for every kind of taste?