![]() ![]() The word argument comes from the Latin arguere, after all, which means, according to my favorite online etymology dictionaries, “to make clear” or “to make reasoned statements to prove or refute a proposition.” Perhaps Walt and Alexander are arguing this point atop Parnassus right now. Yet Pope’s un-Whitman-like couplets are the English language’s most meter-made argument ever. “For it is not metres, but a meter-making argument, that makes a poem,” wrote that anti-Pope, Walt Whitman. Pope, in his “Essay on Man” and other similar poems, always had points to get across. At this distance, it’s a little hard to tell his baseline-quality couplets from Dryden’s or Samuel Johnson’s. It was to them what free verse is to us - the default mode, simply what poetry sounded like. Pope was simply the best and most transcendent example of a period style the more you go rooting about among his contemporaries and successors, the more you realize that there was a witty century back there when everybody was rocking heroic couplets. It may be that “poetry” and “essay” are such ever broadening and encompassing terms that they have become infinite circles of a perfectly overlapping Venn diagram.Īnd yet the verse essay is still a thing, or was a thing, largely because of a poet named Alexander Pope, whose ideas of what made a good poem were drastically different from ours. Virgil’s hexameters dispensing (sometimes less than sound) advice to farmers, Dante’s rants about politics, Elizabethan stage monologues - if we go looking about for proto-essays, we can find them all over the long history of Western poetry. Horace wrote epistles, and his “Ars Poetica,” addressed to the senator Piso and his sons, is one of the earliest “craft essays” we possess. ![]() Yet those early examples of the essay sometimes happened in verse. Regardless of where they place its origins, most readers assume an essay is a work of prose. Many a classical epistle, written for publication by some esteemed Roman, could qualify as a precursor, complete with the personal anecdotes that seem so “modern” today. The practice of the essay - the autobiographical essay, the essay about travel, the “creative nonfiction” essay, the thinkpiece - has expanded so much that you can find its antecedents wherever you look. Most literary histories will tell you that Montaigne invented the essay, although it’s difficult to tell his work apart from Plutarch’s Moralia over a millennium earlier.
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