Article Archive: The Literary Life

Articles from Poet & Writers Magazine include material from the print edition plus exclusive online-only material.

On Essays: Literature’s Most Misunderstood Form

by
Michael Depp
7.1.02

This is not an essay. Though maybe, in a way, it is. Because it's a strange thing about essays—even talking about them, trying to get at what they are, it's hard not to cleave to the spirit of the essay, that inconclusive, most outwardly formless of forms, which spills and seeps into so many other kinds of writing-memoir, feature, commentary, review—and punctuates every assertion with a qualification, a measure of doubt, an alternate possibility.

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