Disusing the Ear: Samuel Daniel and the Poetics of Poetical Essays

Around the turn of the seventeenth century, a growing number of poems began calling themselves “poetical essays.” The term registers the impact of Montaigne’s writings in English, even before John Florio’s translation appeared in 1603. It also illuminates a distinct but parallel tradition of essays in poetry, one that tracked the essay in prose from its earliest days. But the idea of the “poetical essay” also feels like a paradox: it is hard to see how the essay’s looser style of thinking could accommodate itself to the formal constraints of verse. This essay will explore this paradox with the help of Samuel Daniel, whose own collection of Poeticall Essayes appeared in 1599. Daniel was an early and careful reader of Montaigne’s essays. He used their analysis of custom in his 1603 Defence of Ryme to frame his reflections on rhyme, history, and epistemology. But in Musophilus, the centerpiece of his Poeticall Essayes, he also extended Montaigne’s insights into the practical realm of poetic technique. In trying out different patterns of syntax and rhyme, accustoming his readers to standards he will subsequently modulate, Daniel shows us how poems might think like essays, not despite their verse, but with and through it. [T.T.]