To essay is to try but not to attempt. It is to establish trial. The essay is the most human literary form in that it is always sure, it remains from first to last fixed. Nothing affects it. It may stop, but if it stops that is surely the end and so it remains perfect, just as with an infant which fails to continue. It suffers disclosures, up and down, but nothing can affect it. It is as a man: a lunatic or not; no matter. Whatever passes through it, it is never that thing. It remains itself and continues so, pure motion.
(William Carlos Williams, Imaginations 321-2)
Again
