On the Essay

Essaying is an activity of attention and openness—to your own thinking, and to the myriad ways your thinking takes shape as thought on a page; to the often dim contours of your physical and emotional life; to the memories you construct (and reconstruct) as you make sense of what you call your past; to the building of the larger story, the emergence of a sequence of events that conjure a history, marshaling language to produce the impression (the illusion) that through writing worlds past may become present again; to the world around you, as you begin to see, again and again, that there is more and more than meets the eye .

A poetics of the essay includes the literary and cultural history of the essay––from its emergence in the sixteenth century to current forms in the twenty-first century that make use of sound, image, and visual design. The story includes statements about the nature and purpose of the essay, and questions about definitions that come up in lively conversations and quarrels about thought, language conventions, and literary form.

It is a story worth knowing. The decidedly formal methods of classical rhetoric and medieval scholasticism; what Joseph Addison called in the early eighteenth century the “looseness” and “freedom” of an essay; Theodor Adorno’s twentieth-century call for the essay to proceed “methodically unmethodically”; the essay as a “personal” orientation (as opposed to the “factual” article); the adventures of an engaged mind in the process of searching for a form; the confessional-imperative in what Laura Bennett calls the “first person industrial complex,” or the essay as defined by the “presence” of a distinctive persona––in these, and in other formulations, one finds the possibilities of a poetics of the essay.

A poetics of the essay is of special interest to writers of the essay who are cultivating attentiveness and openness, to themselves and to the world. As the writer Scott Russell Sanders explains in “The Singular First Person,” his essays attempt to “speak directly out of my life into the lives of others.” Of course essaying out of one’s life and into the lives of others, we might do well to keep in mind what Sanders adds, that “you had better speak from a region pretty close to the heart, or the reader will detect the wind of phoniness whistling through your hollow phrases.”