Essay
An essay is a piece of writing which is often written from an author's personal point of view. Essays can consist of a number of elements, including: literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author. The definition of an essay is vague, overlapping with those of an article and a short story. Almost all modern essays are written in prose, but works in verse have been dubbed essays (e.g. Alexander Pope's An Essay on Criticism and An Essay on Man). While brevity usually defines an essay, voluminous works like John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Thomas Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population are counterexamples.
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Famous quotes containing the word essay:
“A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in, not out.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“‘Twas something we knew all about to begin with
And needn’t have fared into space like his master
To find ‘twas the effort, the essay of love.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay.... the essay must be pure—pure like water or pure like wine, but pure from dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)