What Are Poetical Essays?

Around the turn of the seventeenth century, a growing number of poems began to style themselves as ‘poetical essays’. The name reveals the impact of Montaigne’s example on English writing, even before Florio’s 1603 translation. It also indicates an affinity, at once intuitive and perplexing, between the essay and the lyric. The emergence of the essay from Montaigne onwards gave sixteenth-century poets new ways of writing and understanding lyric. Montaigne’s essays may even have picked up its bad habits from lyric in the first place, as Samuel Johnson once uncharitably suggested.

At the same time, lyric inherited from the essay a set of problems, of thought and of form: what kind of thinking it could do, and what shape it should take. This paper sets out to explore the poetics and practice of the poetical essay. Its chief protagonist is Samuel Daniel, who began playing around with essays in his 1599 Musophilus, and formulated something like its poetic rationale in his 1603 Defence of Ryme. Depending on time, there may also be cameo appearances from Fulke Greville, Ben Jonson, and - more reliably - Montaigne himself. Daniel was among the earliest and most brilliant readers of Montaigne’s essays in England. And through that reading, he worked out new ways of thinking in verse, to test and contest the virtues of the poetical essay.

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