MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE, reputed father of the essay, wrote at the end of the sixteenth century: “To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquillity in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately” (“Of Experience,” 3:13; 851). In this supreme venture, the trial, the effort, the essai, is enabled by, as it is embodied in, the form to which he gave a name: “The doing, the writing itself, is both a path to knowing and a path of knowing; as I write, I...

IT ALL STARTED WITH MONTAIGNE, although a broken lineage may be traced back to his beloved Seneca, as well as perhaps to Plutarch, and even to Plato. The essay as we know it takes its origin and its texture, if not entirely its direction, from Michel de Montaigne’s publication of Essais in 1580. Montaigne penned his “attempts” or “trials”—the respected Hungarian theorist Georg Lukacs described the chosen term essays as an “arrogant courtesy”—in seclusion from the horrible scenes then transpiring in his great country. The first edition of Essais consisted of books I and II, that of 1588...

TEACHING OFTEN BRINGS such heightened awareness and perhaps such intensity of consciousness as Zen labels mindfulness. At least I find it so. Most recently, as I struggled to show how Eliot both posits an “Impersonal theory of poetry” and commits himself to the usually reflective form known as the essay, all the while condemning Romantic poetry for precisely its reflectiveness, I read aloud the following passage in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”: the poet, wrote Eliot, “will be aware . . . that he must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past. I say judged, not amputated, by...

YOU CAN REST CONFIDENT in very few positive statements regarding the essay. One of the safest, it has long seemed, is that, no matter what else the essay is or is not, it is written in prose. This assumption baffles me—even more than the truism that the essay is a piece of writing that you can manage to read in one sitting. Virginia Woolf called A Room of One’s Own an essay, and although it is certainly powerful, gripping reading, I for one cannot read—or re-read—it in one sitting; not only is it around 150 pages, but...

SATIRE IS A PARTICULAR LITERARY FORM. So is the essay. Unfortunately sometimes these forms are confused, even fused, their essential differences elided. Some irony attends here, for in fact satire consists of the elimination of precisely such differences as play between itself and the essay.

The inclusion of Jonathan Swift’s great satire “A Modest Proposal” among essays betrays the need for distinction. It reveals the poverty of inclusive accounts of the essay. Despite the undeniable impossibility of defining this protean form, to house almost anything in prose under the rubric—while, incidentally, denying the title, or honorific, to even those...

DR. JOHNSON’S ESSAYS are much closer to Bacon’s than to Montaigne’s. They show next to none of the latter’s self-expressiveness while based in and deriving from the latter’s English, and Anglican, proclivity for balance. You can find no more originality of thought or feeling than you can “enthusiasm.” They are public rather than private, their truth general and common instead of individual and particular. They make not for fun reading, but they do—still—“furnish . . . mankind with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light” (Swift, The Battle of the Books 368).

Their author was...

“THE SOUL OF A JOURNEY,” writes William Hazlitt, friend of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Charles Lamb and one of the premier nineteenth-century essayists, “is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases” (93). For such perspectives, Tom Paulin has recently written of, and embraced, his “radical style.” As an essayist, Hazlitt anticipates Thoreau, in “Walking,” who likewise “saunters” (a sans terre, opines the latter, in one of his more egregious puns), but the differences tell more than the similarities. Hazlitt is more companionable, despite his wellknown anger and despite his preference for solitary walking, less a “hairshirt of...

I WOULD AVOID EMERSON IF I COULD. He is difficult, and I never feel that I (can) understand him. Harold Bloom thinks him essential, the very fount of the literature that we call American. I find him a thoroughgoing Transcendentalist, and I do not much care for either Transcendentalists or the “thoroughgoing.” He is, I reckon, much that Eliot rejected when he chose England and left the Unitarianism of his youth for Anglo-Catholicism, itself the incarnation of the pattern (of Incarnation) that Emerson could never quite see, his eyeball transparent.

I cannot avoid Emerson, however, but not because of Harold...

LYDIA FAKUNDINY IS RIGHT, AS USUAL: “Walking, rambling, sauntering, strolling, wandering are more than recurrent topics of essay writing; they’re images by which essayists like to figure their particular mode of discoursing, tropes of essaying itself” (15). The titles of early “essay periodicals” (as Fakundiny calls them) affirms the point: if not already Addison and Steele’s Spectator very early in the eighteenth century, certainly by the time Dr. Johnson called his The Rambler, then The Adventurer, and finally The Idler. Understandably essayists are fond of walking and of walking as subject; see, to name only those who spring immediately to...

THIS BEAUTIFUL LITTLE ESSAY—less than three pages in Lydia Fakundiny’s anthology The Art of the Essay—is to be read in solitude, savored, perused, meditated upon. Published in 1928 in the collection The Spirit of Place and reprinted thirty years later in Wayfaring, it needs be set against William Hazlitt’s “On Going a Journey” and Thoreau’s “Walking,” as well as Samuel Johnson’s “The Solitude of the Country,” which has little good to say about any solitude but says what it says in a manner controlled and erudite. In “Solitudes,” with its proclamation of different kinds of aloneness, the matter...

IN 1910 GEORG LUKÁCS PUBLISHED what turned out to be a seminal discussion of the essay. The Hungarian theorist modestly represented “On theNature and Form of the Essay” as “a letter to a friend”—the kind of “arrogant courtesy” he himself ascribes to “he great Sieur de Montaigne,” acknowledged father of the form Lukács is celebrating. Lukács’s great contribution lies in positing irony as fundamental to the essay, to be found, he claims, “in the writings of every truly great essayist”: “And the irony I mean consists in the critic always speaking about the ultimate problems of life, but in...

G. K. CHESTERTON’S “A PIECE OF CHALK” is a strikingly beautiful essay, elegantly written and full of noble sentiments. Sentences and sententiae alike charm and beguile even jaded undergraduates. Who but can marvel at such craftsmanship as these words incarnate: “But though I could not with a crayon get the best out of the landscape, it does not follow that the landscape was not getting the best out of me”; “They [‘the old poets who lived before Wordsworth’] preferred writing about great men to writing about great hills; but they sat on the great hills to write it. They gave...

VIRGINIA WOOLF PRESENTS “God’s plenty” of essays from which to choose for reading. A personal favorite is “The Death of the Moth.” Tempting for less personal reasons is “The Moment,” which stands contrast with Woolf’s friend T. S. Eliot’s poetic lucubrations on time, arguably the essayist’s consuming subject. Not to be overlooked, of course, are the essays that make up A Room of One’s Own. I did not, finally, feel confident about this possibility, partly because I am not sure which of the six parts I would have chosen, partly because, in fact, the whole is an essay, or so...

I INTRODUCE ELIOT’S GREAT, revolutionary essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” indirectly, at least to undergraduates, by way and means of Hilaire Belloc’s magnificent, and much more accommodating, “The Mowing of a Field.” Those who have read this work and sympathetically considered the entire essay tradition may be somewhat less resistant to Eliot’s anti-Romantic reinterpretation of tradition, individualism, the nature of poetry—and of the essay. Included in The Sacred Wood (1920), his essay is justly famous, although not eagerly taken up by either graduates or undergraduates, the latter of whom find it “tough sledding” while the former—these days...

THESE “THOUGHTS WERE BRED / BY READING,” of course (I quote John Dryden’s Religio Laici or A Laymans Faith 226–27). First of all, surgeon-teacher-writer Richard Selzer’s essay “A Worm from My Notebook.” But also, frankly, Lydia Fakundiny’s comments on an earlier version of the present essay, on which I feed heartily, parasitical. She, however, incurs no responsibility for whatever “crude”-ness (Dryden’s selfcharacterization) I have shown in moving with her observations. She says, rightly, that I did Selzer’s deceptively complex essay a considerable disservice in “under-reading” it. A lesson attends, I reckon—for all of us.

“A Worm fromMy Notebook”...

OVER THE PAST TWENTY YEARS, roughly, Scott Russell Sanders has published some half dozen collections of essays, including the prizewinning The Paradise of Bombs (1985), and continuing through his latest, The Force of Spirit. Hailed as a nature writer and social critic, Sanders surely derives from Thoreau, but is far less prickly. Perhaps most apparent in Sanders is a deep and broad sympathy. There is, at the same time, a clear rootedness and an abiding appreciation of place, in Sanders’s case stemming from his youth in the limestone country of southern Ohio and, for thirty-some years, Bloomington, Indiana. Sanders’s voice...

WHENEVER I READ these climactic lines in Four Quartets, which I take to be an essay, I cannot but picture Annie Dillard, poet, author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974), critic, memoirist, essayist, and mystical seeker after the Infinite. For the Time Being—unclassifiable, it seems to me—represents the turns her seeking has taken, including Hasidism and Buddhism, Hinduism, and medieval Christian mysticism. Her writing—notably, I think, in The Writing Life—is a secular saint’s life: writing as monastic, mystical to the core, also essayistic in its probing of the line of...

GEORGE ORWELL IS SUDDENLY “IN,” owing only partially to the pundit and author Christopher Hitchens’s interest in and recent book on him. Perhaps the rabid sectarianism and party spirit now dominating the American political scene, at least, accounts for this rediscovery. Certainly it is for his politics, rather than his significant contributions to the essay form, that Orwell is now receiving widespread attention. The danger remains of appropriation, as in the past, by exponents of the Left and the Right alike—despite Orwell’s declared and demonstrated embrace of what he once attributed to Charles Dickens: a “free intelligence,” with its...

NO SLOUCH HIMSELF when it comes to composing them, E. B. White once praised Thoreau’s Walden as made of sentences. That “hair-shirt of a man” (241), says White, “tended to write in sentences, a feat not every writer is capable of, and Walden is, rhetorically speaking, a collection of certified sentences, some of them, it would now appear [he was writing on the centennial of its publication], as indestructible as they are errant.” The “off-beat prose that Thoreau was master of,” according to his admirer, was “at once strictly disciplined and wildly abandoned”; indeed, “a copy-desk man would get a...

PEN PASSION IS A MIGHTY PASSION. Writers have long testified so, from Sir Walter Scott to John Grisham, Virginia Woolf to Edmund White, Roland Barthes to Barry Hannah. For some, the passion takes the form of collecting, for the lucky ones, both collecting and writing. The latter of us suppose we cannot write with anything else—certainly cannot write so well. We practically crave the pen, eagerly await the return to it in the morning, happy only when pen and person are in sync, instrument become appendage. Little I know approaches in pleasure that of a flexible nib caressing the...

SAM PICKERING MAY STILL BE BETTER KNOWN as the teacher on whom Dead Poets Society is based than as an essayist. Robin Williams’s portrayal of John Keating, dedicated prep-school teacher, engaged millions; Pickering’s volumes of personal and familiar essays also engage and endear for many of the same reasons. The movie is truthful to the character of the teacher-essayist, for years now professor of English at the University of Connecticut. That character is a definite persona, closely related although not identical to the man.

Of all of Pickering’s essays, I have chosen to read here the last in A Continuing...

FOR THE READER NEW TO Elwyn Brooks White and the essay, the oft-anthologized “The Ring of Time” may seem problematical, falling abruptly and precipitously into two rather distinct parts and punctuated with a three-paragraph postscript. For the reader familiar with White and versed in the essay, “The Ring of Time” appears layered, carefully crafted, and deeply resonant. For the college or university student, like some others acquainted with the author and conversant with the form of which he was a master, this particular essay may seem characteristically wise, in places very nearly brilliant, and a good “read”—even if it...

ZORA NEALE HURSTON’S SPLENDID, taut “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” is by no means the only essay to begin slowly, with a lengthy, seemingly disproportionate description. E. B. White’s on his teacher-mentor Will Strunk notoriously takes its time getting from a sluggish account of Manhattan and mosquitoes there in summer to the curt advice to “simplify, simplify, simplify” Thoreau brought to the act of composition. I have said elsewhere—in Tracing the Essay—that the essay as form is characterized by sneakiness, and perhaps it is that that prompts Hurston to delay her real subject until fully one-third...

NANCY MAIRS IS A GIFTED AND remarkable writer, none of her considerable body of work more remarkable than her first collection of essays, Plaintext (1986). Of the twelve, divided into three groups with the designations “Self,” “Life,” and “Writing,” none is stronger, or more moving, than “On Being a Cripple.” Mairs appears incapable of indulging in either conceit or in concealment, “one thing the essayist cannot do,” according to E. B. White.

Early in “On Being a Cripple,” Mairs addresses her decidedly “un-pc” choice of language to describe her condition, the result of multiple sclerosis. “To be fair to myself,”...

JAMES BALDWIN’S FIRST, MAGNIFICENT, and highly influential collection of essays Notes of a Native Son invites comparison and contrast with Richard Wright’s novel Native Son. The title essay of that collection, on the other hand, invites comparison with Zora Neale Hurston’s much-anthologized essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.” Baldwin’s observation recorded above as one of my epigraphs invites a larger reflection, for his sense of the sympathetic imagination—my term, not his, but shared with Hurston nevertheless and worked out in the last few essays of the aforementioned collection—deserves placement and consideration alongside the more recognized observations...

IN THE ART OF THE ESSAY, Lydia Fakundiny opines that “ ‘What I Think, What I Am’ must be the best short essay in English on what an essay is.” That may well be—and not only because most of the considerable number of essays on the essay are long. “Needless to say,” Fakundiny adds, Edward Hoagland’s essay, from his 1976 collection The Tugman’s Passage, “shows even as it tells” (690). It is, in other words, an essay about the essay: both an essay and commentary on the essay. An elegant modesty attends and striates the entire essai.

Its opening...

INTRODUCING The Art of the Personal Essay, Phillip Lopate rejects the judgment borrowed from the Spanish philosopher Eduardo Nicol that the essay is “almost literature” and “almost philosophy.” I used these phrases as an epigraph in my Tracing the Essay and have modified and extended them in the present book. While apparently accepting Walter Pater’s description of the essay’s “unmethodical method,” Lopate, himself an essayist of no mean accomplishment, offers this claim about one of the most important, and most troubling, issues facing study, use, and incorporation of the essay: “From my perspective,” Lopate harrumphs, “there is no almost about...