So these are odious categories, “commercial” and “literary.” Mind-forged manacles. But they exist, yes, they do exist. We could point at their different velocities, commercial fiction being produced faster (and read faster) than literary fiction. We could say that commercial fiction is the stuff people want to read, while literary fiction is the stuff they think they should read. It’s no joke, the inferiority complex of the general reader — especially here in America, where the nasty word “smart” is a great compliment. How many books are purchased in ghostly fits of aspiration, of “I ought to be the person who reads this”? The big fat cerebral novel comes along, flumpety-flump, dragging its blurbs, and the browbeaten consumer thinks, “Oh, dear, I’d better get that.” And so he buys it, and installs it on the bedside table, and then he carries on with his Jack Reacher novel.

I’m sure someone’s already invented the app that turns commercial prose into literary prose. Because at one level, it’s simply a lexical matter. Sentences that include the word “skein” or “susurration,” or use any form of the disgusting verb “to limn” — they’re literary. A line like “‘Be quiet, Paul!’ snapped Louise,” on the other hand — that’s commercial. (Just thought of a name for the app: Updiker.) The great ones, of course, the writers we love and return to, are above all this. Or below it, it doesn’t matter. “Hemingway didn’t have the language to write in the classical sense of the omniscient author,” Elmore Leonard told a biographer, “and it was the same with me.” Leonard, I’m guessing, was not sitting on a secret drawerful of unpublished purple prose. He wasn’t all soggy with thwarted poetic ambition. The totality of his artistic nature was expressed and projected in his swinging, clipped, wonderfully commercial novels. Kate Atkinson: There’s another one.

Good language is about nailing the details, pinning down reality. Sometimes literary language gets this done — more often, it doesn’t. Away with your skeins and your susurrations. Limn me no limnings. True poets know about, and pay homage to, the power of commercial language. In 1959, Ted Hughes entered a competition organized by the Heinz corporation, which was looking for a good line to advertise its baked beans. Hughes’s entry, typically organized according to ancient bardic principles (“alliteration, assonance and internal rhyme”), was this: “Whoever minds how he dines demands Heinz.” Not bad, if a bit, I don’t know, baronial. But it was blown away by the eventual winner, the line Hughes acknowledged to be “inspired”: “Beanz meanz Heinz.” Do you know who wrote that? I don’t.

James Parker is a contributing editor at The Atlantic and has written for Slate, The Boston Globe and Arthur magazine. He was a staff writer at The Boston Phoenix and in 2008 won a Deems Taylor Award for music criticism from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers.