SOURCE: Williams, David. “Voltaire's ‘True Essay’ on Epic Poetry.” Modern Language Review 88 (1993): 46-57.

In the essay below, Williams presents his history of Voltaire's Essai sur la poésie épique, from the first English essay through the unauthorized translations and Voltaire's corrections. Williams suggests that Voltaire's revisions attempted to make the essay more appealing to French readership, but also had the effect of blunting his arguments.

For almost one hundred and fifty years after the appearance of the first authorized edition of Voltaire's Essai sur la poésie épique in 1733, described in a letter to Thieriot as ‘my true essay on poetry’ (D336), French readers took this text alone to be Voltaire's definitive statement on the modern European epic.¹ The original version of the essay, which he brought out in remarkably elegant English in 1727 as An Essay upon the Epick Poetry of the European Nations, from Homer down to...