If there's a poster boy for the fact that all essays are written through personae, it's Crèvecoeur.

I thought that I wasn't an essayist because I just didn't see myself in a lot of the essays that were popular at the time. That's why I joined the poetry program in grad school.

In college I studied essays with a poet, and so I think my interpretation of the genre was always going to be a little off-kilter.

Plutarch's peers were writing "rhetorics," which were these dry philosophical treatises that made really broad gestures about life and death and fate. Plutarch stepped out of the stream to create an essayistic form that relied on a digressive structure and down to earth anecdotes.

Pedagogically, we need definitions and borders. They help us get our heads around what we're talking about.

An essay is something that tracks the evolution of a human mind.

The best stuff that Cicero wrote, in the first century in Rome, were the Philippics, a series of speeches that he delivered against Marc Antony, whom he thought was irreparably dismantling the Republic of Rome. Those speeches are powerful because they're not only really pointed but they're thrillingly beautiful - and that's precisely what made them dangerous: the fact that people wanted to read them.