Category: Essay anthology

The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present, ed. Phillip Lopate, 1994.

June 2026 — ???

This is the 27th book we’ve tackled for the Essays Project. This is a giant anthology which should keep us going through the summer – and given anticipated travel likely well into next year. While we had considered being more eclectic, and curating batches of essays from various authors, after one trial (Johnson, EP#26) it seemed easier to return to a published anthology which both eases the burden of selection, and guarantees us paper pages upon which to make notes. So here we gol

Introduction

An excellent introduction that takes on the task of trying to distinguish the personal essay from other sorts of essays, and from seemingly similar writing such as memoir and autobiography. Among Lopate’s claims about what distinguishes the personal essay from other forms of essay:

• Sets up a dialog with the reader based on identification, understanding, testiness, and companionship
• Contains self-revelation, personal experiences and tastes, and can affect a confidential manner
• Less formal in that it may have a rambling structure, relaxed diction, freshness of form, and makes no claims to completeness or definitive treatment. Digressions are OK.
• Depends more on style and personality than flawless reasoning
• May be conversational, with throat clearing, or putting objections in the mouth of the reader
• Struggle for honesty; vulnerability; self-revelation; self-doubt and self-questioning; admission of uncertainty, lapses, errors, defects, shortcomings. Interrogation of one’s own ignorance. Amused self-observation.
• The narrator must be reliable
• Contrariness: Stand a platitude on its head. Implicate first oneself, then the reader.
• Unashamed subjectiveness; “skeptical yet gyroscopically poised.”

And this taste for the miniature becomes a strong suit of the form: the ability to turn anything close at hand (Charles Lamb’s ears, Virginia Woolf’s moth, Samuel Johnson’s boarding house) into a grand meditational adventure.

—The Art of the Personal Essay, p xxviii (in Introduction by Phillip Lopate)

Forerunners

Seneca: On Noise; Asthma; Scipio’s Villa; Slaves

As Lopate says in the introduction, one of his goals is to bring in writings that, while not essays by his definition, have some of the central characteristics he sees in the personal essay. Seneca, followed by Plutarch, are the two [western] classical antecedents.

Seneca seems particularly apt in that, unlike most classical authors, his personality comes through: we come to get a sense of the man through his writing about other things. Other essay-like characteristics include a focus on the mundane (how people behave in a bath house), and moving from the particular to the universal (from asthma to death), and a bit of impish humor at the end (where after all this complaining and discussion of the noise, he admits he is about to move elsewhere.

Plutarch: Consolation to His Wife

The Plutarch entry, cast as another predecessor to the essay, seems less apt than Seneca’s work, because it is a letter to his wife rather than writing addressed to a larger audience. As a consequence, the familiarity of his voice, and the emotional quality of his writing (also a consequence of the topic), seem to me to spring from the particular circumstances, rather than the sort of impulses that motivate personal essayists,

… reading break …

These next three pieces are not essays, in my view, but indicate that the impulse that shaped essays arose independently of western thought.

Sei Shonagan: “Hateful Things”

Sei Shonagan is a court lady in 10th Century Japan. She comes across as a snob: opinionated, mannered, petty, spiteful.

This forerunner of the essay is essentially a list of everything she hates, ranging from the minute (a mosquito’s buzz in the bedroom at night) to boorish ill-mannered people. Mildly amusing, and the list tells us a good deal about her and the times and situation in which she lives.

This piece illustrates Lopate’s “unashamed subjectiveness” and “self-revelation,” and the essay’s “taste for the miniature” (e.g. the mosquito’s whine). The list form of this essay also anticipates modern essays that cast themselves as lists (which I don’t care for)

Kenko: Essays in Idleness

Kenko was some kind of court functionary in 13th-14th C Japan, with a reputation as a poet.

The piece is composed of a series of unconnected (as far as I can see) passages about places, scenes, thoughts and so forth. Though as the editor selected the passages to include, perhaps there would be more connection if we could see it all.

It is true it had an informal tone, and treated with every day life. And that it looks closely at small things. And that it, perhaps, in its fragmentary, drifting form illustrates the approach of keeping things open and incomplete.

That said, I did not find this writing very interesting. Lacks the wit, verve, and humor of Shonagan.

Ou-Yang Hsiu: Pleasure Boat Studio

An 11th C Chinese Sung dynasty classical poet ranked as one of the 8 masters of classical Chinese prose. He was a member of the imperial court, and held various offices throughout his life.

He has named his office in the Palace Pleasure Boat Studio, and this piece explains why. He explains that the rooms that make up his office are arranged in a single row, and so the space is long and narrow like a boat. He also notes that after he was exiled he lived on a boat and sailed rivers, and comments that the real purpose of a boat is to deliver people from danger, and not pleasure. But at the same time he notes that some have found pleasure in living on boats, even though he has no time for such diversions. So I suppose his naming his office “Pleasure Boat” is ironic, though perhaps he also likes the connotation of delivering him from danger.

But it doesn’t really make sense to me. Not a vey thrilling piece in my view.

In terms of Lopate’s characteristics of personal essays, this shows contrariness, self-deprecation, and the conversational gesture of speaking to the reader: “Is there anything wrong with that?”

… reading break …

Fountainhead (Montaigne)

Introduction

• Lopate suggests M may have been the greatest essayist who ever lived.
• His family on both sides was wealthy; they were minor land owning nobility
• Notes that he was raised speaking only Latin for the first years of his life, which (not mentioned here) also means he had almost no interaction with his parents or anyone except his tutor.
• M studied law and practiced as a magistrate
• He cast his essays as self-study, a portrait of himself in words.
• His first book, written from 1572-1574, was short and filled with quotations and not especially personal—but it was a success and gave him more confidence.
• M felt there was a basic unity to human experience. He regarded humanity as constantly in flux, and vain, ashamed and contradictory. But he embedded these views in a frame of forgiveness.
• “His own sentences were sinewy, dry, yet succulent: they explode like pomegranate seeds on the tongue.”
• He wrote in the vernacular, not Latin

…the spirit of humanism was in the air, via Erasmus and others, and the classical Greek and Roman authors were being used as a Trojan borse to open the gates to a freer, more speculative and self-analytical mentality (Socrates’ “Know thyself’). Rabelais great, bawdy novel, Gargantua and Pantagruel, likewise gave Montaigne license to write in support of pleasure and an integration of mind and body. Alongside an increase in classical learning and scientific knowledge, new worlds were literally being discovered. Explorers brought back reports of exotic native customs from the Americas and the Pacific, which fueled Montaigne’s relativistic bent.
—ibid., 44

While Montaigne deserves credit for inventing the form, I have to say I don’t care for his writing. He takes paragraphs to say what might be said in a few sentences. And although many seem to think the uncertainty and changeability is a virtue, or at least a characteristic of the new form, I find it a bit irritating. There is something to be said for emphasizing that an important aspect of the personal essay has to do with how the author approaches the topic, but Montaigne not only disclaims expertise, which is fair, but seems to shirk any responsibility for accuracy or accountability.

Having written the above, after reading a few of his essays, I do have to say that I appreciate his tolerant and even compassionate approach.

Of Books, Michel de Montaigne

The first two pages are mostly disclaimer. He portrays himself as unlearned (which does not seem accurate), and uninterested in grappling with difficult books or study—he just wants to enjoy himself.

• “Let attention not be paid to the matter, but to the shape I give it.”
• “I want them to give Plutarch a fillip on my nose and get burned insulting Seneca in me.”

After this he comments on books he likes (and some he does not), beginning with entertaining books, fables, poetry. He also likes Seneca, Plutarch, and Cicero.

Of a Monstrous Child, Michel de Montaigne

M describes a child who is a partial Siamese twin, with a headless body joined to his abdomen. He comments that this might be seen as an omen, but it is better not to: “there is nothing like divining about things past. ‘So that when things happen, by some interpretation they are found to have been prophesied.‘ [Cicero]”

M is compassionate, and argues against revulsion. “We call contrary to nature what happens contrary to custom; nothing is anything but according to nature, whatever it may be. Let this universal and natural reason drive out of us the error and astonishment that novelty brings us.“

… reading break …

On Some Verses of Virgil

This essay exhibits  a candid, cheerful acceptance of the body and its pleasures — especially sexual pleasure — as a defense against the gloom of old age. A minor theme is a defense of writing about oneself without shame or euphemism.

On Aging

Written as M was aging and ailing, he refers to his own bodily decline and refuses a “melancholic and dull tranquillity,” instead cultivating cheerfulness.

Let childhood look ahead, old age backward: was not this the meaning of the double face of Janus? Let the years drag me along if they will, but backward. As long as my eyes can discern that lovely season now expired, I turn them in that direction at intervals. If youth is escaping from my blood and my veins, at least I want not to uproot the picture of it from my memory.

— Michel Montaigne, p 59 [in Lopate]

On Candid Self-disclosure

M defends writing frankly; not surprising since his project is to write about himself, and how he sees things. With regard to sex he notes the hypocrisy that we all have sex yet are ashamed to talk about it because of convention. Complete self-portraiture requires not exempting the body, and indeed he refers to his various ailments and alludes to his own sexual inadequacy.

On Love vs. Marriage

“Love and marriage are two intentions that go by separate and distinct roads. “

Erotic love and marriage run on different principles. Marriage is a rational, social, durable bond; sexual passion is volatile and belongs elsewhere. Passionate love inside marriage is unstable, even dangerous. 

Men and Women

“Women are not wrong at all when they reject the rules of life that have been introduced into the world, inasmuch as it is the men who have made these without them. “

M argues that men and women are not fundamentally different vis a vis sexual appetite. The demands of chastity and constancy are imposed by men and culturally arbitrary; women are judged unfairly. (But there is also misogyny common to those times — women are beguiling, inconstant, vicious — the essay is not proto-feminist, though it does repeatedly undercut male self-flattery.)

I say that males and females are cast in the same mold; except for education and custom, the difference is not great. Plato invites both without discrimination to the fellowship of all studies, exercises, functions, warlike and peaceful occupations, in his commonwealth. And the philosopher Antisthenes eliminated any distinction between their virtue and ours.

Other matters

• Jealousy: Reflections on how sexual and marital customs vary across cultures — reinforcing that our norms are contingent.
• Impotence: his own, and the undesirability of old men in general
• On writing: “Any topic is equally fertile to me. A fly will serve my purpose.” “I owe a complete portrait of myself to the public.”
• On his conduct of affairs: he presents himself as fair to a fault.

… reading break …

The Rise of the English /essay

Abraham Crowley

Of Greatness

“I confess I love littleness in all things. A little convenient estate, a little cheerful house, a little company, and a very little feast…“

The essay argues that greatness is not desirable. It is better to be comfortable than wealthy, because wealth and fame come with inconveniences (servitude, disquiet, danger, guilt), and they also incline one to always want more than one has.

…this whole globe of earth, which we account so immense a body, is but one point or atom in relation to those numberless worlds that are scattered up and down in the infinite space of the sky which we behold.

Abraham Crowley, Of Greatness [ibid., p 121]

Addison and Steele

Nicolini and the Lions, by Joseph Addison,

Nicolini and the Lions, by Joseph Addison, is not an allegory (as I initially wondered), though neither it is a review of the opera.

The piece is more of a parody of political factionalism and rumor mongering of the time, as the references to “the whole session,” the mention of the refined politicians in the audience, and the mention friendship among ostensibly opposed parties (“this is what is practiced every day in Westminster Hall.”)

 It is also self-parody, in that the author’s ‘investigation’ is careless and credulous, though his report is presented as though important and official. Perhaps it is a dif at Italian opera as well: “…our present grievance is not the want of a good taste, but of common sense.”

I did not enjoy this essay. It felt a bit stilted, and, for me, parody does not age well.

An Hour or Two Sacred To Sorrow, Richard Steele

The essay begins by distinguishing two types of people: those who wish everyone to know of doings; and those who wish to be unobserved. A nice distinction, but I cannot relate it to the rest of the essay.

The essay observes that some people like to make a practice of withdrawing temporarily from the world to think about friends who have passed away. And Steele (or at least the narrator) resolves to do this. However, he quickly discovers that though the passings of those he recalls gave him great sorrow when they occurred, with the passage of time his feelings have lessened, and he is able to reflect on his late friends with pleasure.

He begins by remembering the death of his father, when he was five. He did not grasp what happened, really, but experienced it through the grief of his mother. He comments on how impressionable children are, and suggests that this early experience with grief imprinted itself on him and made him unduly prone to commiseration, remorse, and “unmanly gentleness of mind, which has since ensnared me into ten thousand calamities….”

He then speaks more generally, remarking that those who are very old remember the companions of their youth better than recent events, and that untimely tragic deaths are what are most lamented, and most remembered. He speaks of those who died in wars, and how they evoke veneration, but at the same time pity wells up when considering the havoc that war wrecks.

He then mentions a woman he loved — whom he depicts as beautiful, ignorant and careless — who died young. “In the same week, I saw her dressed for a ball, and in a shroud.” More sad events rise up in his mind, but then a servant knocks and delivers a letter and a hamper of wine. He decides to send for his friends, and they stay up til 2 drinking and talking (recollecting?) cheerfully.

Twenty-four Hours in London, Richard Steele

“It is an inexpressible pleasure to know a little of the world, and be of no character or significancy in it.” Thus begins this essay, the narrator taking on the character of a curious flaneur, who decides that he is going to spend a full 24 hours roving around London to see what he may see.

He says: “The hours of the Day and Night are taken up in the Cities of London and Westminster by Peoples as different from each other as those who are Born in different Centuries.” The essay then unfolds as he first takes a boat into the City, starting a 4am, visits the markets, engages in a flirtatious pursuit-by-cab of a coy woman, and has other adventures that include a beggar, traders, and coffee house habituees. I liked the conceit of this essay, although it was difficult to follow the references to 18th C professions, activities, and places.

Claude.ai generated the following outline of his tour, which I have pared down to this:

• a dawn boat-journey downriver to market, with a fleet of gardeners’ boats. Ruddy virgins served as supercargoes, and purveyors sold to the merchants in the market
• a stroll through the gay Convent Garden fruit/vegetable/flower market, and observing “fruit wenches” and chimney sweeps flirting (contrasted with the more sober Stocks Market)
• A mock cab-chase of a coquette; the cabbies exchange hand signals about fares and destinations, and engage in mock jostling in the streets.
• Now the people of fashion come out. At the corner of Warwick Street, street performers sing ballads and the narrator is accosted by a sturdy beggar, but is able to escape when the crowd begins making fun of the beggar
• He moves into the center of the city and comes to The Royal Exchange with merchants and high class shops and prosperous people.
• Then it is on to Robbins (“Robin’s Coffee-house in Exchange Alley, a hub for stock-jobbing and finance), where men “give bills for the value of large estates.”
• And then to Will’s (Will’s Coffee-house in Covent Garden, the famous literary/wits’ haunt), where he hears talk of “cards, dice, love, learning, and politics.”
• The day ends with the bellman calling the hour, and him finding a link-boy to light his way home.

Love-Letters, Richard Steele

A short piece on love letters, which argues that the best way to write a love letter as though you are speaking to the person. With that said, he claims that it is better for the man to cast himself as a pleasant and entertaining fellow, than a forlorn lover whose happiness is fully dependent on her. To wit: “If possible therefore divert your mistress, rather than sigh to her. The pleasant Man she will desire for her own Sake; but the languishing Lover has nothing to hope from her but her Pity.”

Samuel Johnson

The Boarding House

xxx

The Solitude of the Country

An interesting essay where Johnson invoked paens to the benefits of retiring to the country for solitude, and then critiques and undercuts them.

Johnson sorts the admirer’s of solitude into types: the arrogant man; the easily offended fault-finders; the imitators of great men (who retired to solitude); the scholars.

The arrogant man will quickly discover he has lost all his flatterers.

The fault finders will turn their scrutiny upon themselves.

As for the imitators of great men:

But what can retirement confer upon him, who having done nothing can receive no support from his own importance, who having known nothing can find no entertainment in reviewing the past, and who intending nothing can form no hopes from prospects of the future: he can, surely, take no wiser course, than that of losing himself again in the crowd, and filling the vacuities of his mind with the news of the day.

—Samuel Johnson, On the Solitude of the Country (ibid., p 142)

And scholars, while they may find solitude conducive to learning, will suffer from the want of others to critique and provide other viewpoints regarding the objects of study.

In sum, Johnson argues that to praise solitude is to covertly to “depreciate mankind,” to say the good others offer isn’t worth the risk of their malice — and he is against that.

Maria Edgeworth, The Noble Science of Self-Justification

I didn’t care for this essay. It is satirical, and never steps out of that form. On the surface, it depicts women as hypocritical manipulators. It does this cleverly, but I just don’t care for it.

The following is Claude.ai’s response to my comment that I didn’t care for the essay because it positioned women as hypocritical manipulators. I asked Claude.ai to explain some of the virtues of the essay. Its response is quite interesting:

In Letters for Literary Ladies (1795) this is the third piece, following a genuine debate on female education. In that debate Edgeworth’s pro-education speaker says outright that women’s appetite for command need not be attributed to any innate cause, and may be fairly ascribed to their erroneous education, and names as the thing he most dreads his daughter absorbing the Rousseauvian idea that cunning and address are the natural resources of her sex. The Self-Justification essay is the exhibit for that argument — a portrait of precisely the woman the preceding letter says bad education produces. Read alone, it looks like a slur; read third, it’s a demonstration. 

—Claude.ai

This was, of course, not of Claude’s invention. I believe it is drawn from one of the sources it cited, likely this: Susan Egenolf / Women’s Literary Networks and Romanticism, ch. on Letters for Literary Ladies (Liverpool UP), on the essay as ironic commentary on the preceding debate.

There is ambiguity about when this essay was published, and whether it appeared only in the book, or appeared separately earlier. The latter undercuts the argument a bit…

… reading break …

Charles Lamb

New Year’s Eve

Each man has two days of note: his birthday, and New Year’s eve. In both cases, these days can lead to reflection on the passage of time. New Year’s eve is of special note.

Of all sound of all bells (bells, the music nighest bordering upon heaven) —most solemn and touching is the peal which rings out the Old Year. I never hear it without a gathering-up of my mind to a concentration of all the images that have been diffused over the past twelvemonth; all I have done or suffered, performed or neglected-in that regretted time. I begin to know its worth, as when a person dies.

—Charles Lamb, New Year’s Eve

Lamb admits he has no fondness for novelties, and prefers familiarity and retrospection. He turns to morality, and refuses to be resigned to death; he defends clinging to everyday pleasures.

I am in love with this green earth; the face of town and country; the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets! ould set up my tabernacle here. I am content to stand still at the age which I am arrived…. I do not want to be weaned by age; or drop, like mellow fruit, as they say, into the grave.

—Charles Lamb, New Year’s Eve

He recalls childhood, an old family grievance, a futile courtship of Alice W., , then closes by quoting a cheerful seventeenth-century poem on the New Year as a tonic against his own melancholy.

A Chapter on Ears

The opening devotes to paragraphs to making a pun: he pretends he is talking about ears, but finally admits he means he has no ear for music. He claims to appreciate church bells and psalm singing, but says he has no feeling for other forms of music.

While he professes real feeling for church bells and plain psalm-singing, he does not take pleasure in other forms of music, and mocks those who do: concertgoers who perform rapture they don’t feel; evenings at a musical friend’s house where accomplished company raves over the great composers while he sits uncomprehending—but at least there is beer.

Dream Children: A Reverie

The essay—or I would say story—begins with the narrator in his armchair telling stories about his grandmother’s house to his two children. He describes the house, an uncle of whom he was fond, and various events, including his unsuccessful attempt to court a woman. who has the same name as one of the children. Through the story telling their are occasional references to the listening children—”Here little Alice spread her hands,” … “Here the children fell to crying.” As he is telling about Alice W, whom he tried to court, he sees her looking out of the eyes of child-Alice, and then the children fade an turn into specters: “We are nothing, and less than nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have been…” And here he awakes, “seated in his bachelor chair.”

The Superannuated Man

An essay on retiring. It begins with an account of the drudgery of the narrator’s job, and his growing disaffection with it (after years of number automaticity). He observes that even during the time he had off—Sundays, and a week of vacation—has job loomed large. Sundays, being focused on religion, gave him little respite to recover from his work. And the week of vacation was not long enough to refresh him: “Was it not a series of seven days spent in a restless pursuit of pleasure, and a wearisome anxiety to find out how to make the most of them.”.

Eventually his superiors noticed his growing malaise, and gave him the opportunity to retire with a generous pension. He describes the disbelief of the first few days—”Time stands still to me… I have lost all distinction of season. I do not know the day of the week or the day of the month.”—and then his growing pleasure of being free of work.

I am Retired Leisure. I am to be met with in trim gardens. I am already come to be known by my vacant face and careless gesture, perambulating at no fixe pace, nor with any settled purpose. I walk about; not to and from. They tell me, a certain cum dignitate air, that has been buried so long with my other good parts, has begun to shoot forth in my person. I grow into gentility perceptibly. When I take up a newspaper, it is to read the state of the opera—Opus operatum est. I have done all that I came into this world to do.

—Charles Lamb, The Superannuated Man

… reading break …

William Hazlitt

On Going on a Journey

The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do, just as one pleases.

—William Hazlitt, On Going a Journey

A pleasant essay about what he gets out of traveling.

The Pleasure of Hating

We read this several years ago. It was nice to re-read it. It still retains a lot of its verve, even though I so not resonate with its dour outlook. Lines that struck me as memorable before still so strike me:

Seeing all this as I do, and unraveling the various threads of human life into meanness, spite, cowardice, want of feeling, and want of understanding, of indifference towards others, and ignorance of ourselves—seeing custom prevail over all excellence, itself giving way to infamy—mistaken as I have been in my public and private hopes, calculating others from myself, and calculating wrong; always disappointed where placed most reliance; the dupe of friendship, and the fool of love; —have I not reason to hate and to despise myself? Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough.

The Fight

I found little to like in this paean to boxing, and the description of the fight and the events leading up to it. Much was obscure, details that no longer are meaningful.

I did ask AI about the context of the essay, and in particular the concept of “The Fancy.” The latter is a reference to boxing as a world where the monied and working classes mix, and where, at least temporarily, they are on equal footing. Hazlitt’s essay seems, in part, to reinforce this conception of “The Fancy” as a special world apart.

Robert Louis Stevenson

The Lantern Bearers

xxxx

An Apology for Idlers

xxxx

On Marriage

xxx

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Quotes I Like

Let childhood look ahead, old age backward: was not this the meaning of the double face of Janus? Let the years drag me along if they will, but backward. As long as my eyes can discern that lovely season now expired, I turn them in that direction at intervals. If youth is escaping from my blood and my veins, at least I want not to uproot the picture of it from my memory.

Praise a hunchback for his handsome figure and he is bound to take it as an insult.

“Love and marriage are two intentions that go by separate and distinct roads. “

It is no longer time to kick when we have let ourselves be hobbled.

“Women are not wrong at all when they reject the rules of life that have been introduced into the world, inasmuch as it is the men who have made these without them. “

“Any topic is equally fertile to me. A fly will serve my purpose.”

Everyone shuns to see a man born, everyone runs to see him die.

Things least feared are least guarded against and observed.

Certainly Love’s conduct has much more style when mingled with heedlessness and confusion; mistakes and misadventures give it style and grace. Provided it is sharp and hungry , it matters little whether it is prudent.

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