Muscular, Flowery
When you read Willa Cather's writing, you might think that you're reading something that's simply flowery: it's really beautiful and definitely has a delicacy to it. Check this bad boy out:
At one moment the whole flock of doves caught the light in such a way that they all became invisible at once, dissolved in light and disappeared as salt dissolves in water. (7.1.33)
That is some ethereal and eloquent prose, dagnabbit.
But when you actually look at most of the prose line-by-line, you can see just how straightforward it is. Take, for example, this line from the end of the book: "The change was that the old man did not want food, and that he slept, or seemed to sleep, nearly all the time" (9.8.2). That is Hemingway-style straightforward, folks.
The reason that the novel might seem flowery overall, though, is because Cather uses a lot of these short, simple sentences to create heaps of detail until you're holding so many images in your head that the whole thing seems like one big sentence.
Cather manages to write prose that's not only dense, but also airy and poetic at the same time. How she does it? We dunno. That's like asking Beethoven, "Hey Ludwig? How do you compose such pretty songs?" The mystery of genius, folks.