Yesterday the mailman brought me the current issue of The Fourth River, which features several of my western Pennsylvania poems. It also features an essay by Phillip Lopate, whose beautiful anthology The Art of the Personal Essay has been a model and a support during my own venture into the world of anthologizing. I have not yet finished the essay he contributed to The Fourth River, but already I can see that what he writes will matter to me.

from The Future of the Essay by Phillip Lopate

The true essayist is not only antiquated but an antiquarian, who gladly draws on and plays with the form's historical traditions. It has been that way ever since Montaigne quoted and jousted with the ancients, Seneca, Plutarch, and Cicero, or Lamb invoked in his mannered prose the shades of Thomas More, Robert Burton and the Duchess of Newcastle. Hazlitt wrote about Montaigne; Virginia Woolf wrote about Hazlitt and Emerson. Essayists are in a conversation with their ancestors, trying to explore from a new angle the same preoccupations about how to live; about friendship, conversation, manners, and solitude.