The Best American Poetry

The Spymaster as Vacuum-Cleaner Salesman

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And the sad man is cock of all his jests.

-- George Herbert

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Epigraph to Graham Greene's novel Our Man in Havana (1958). The protagonist -- an English widower living in pre-Castro Cuba -- is a vacuum-cleaning salesman named Wormwold, as unattractive a name as Greene could manage. In order to satisfy the demands of intelligence officers in a gray faceless London building, Wormwold dupes them; he creates "purely notional spies" and kill them off, "like a bad novelist preparing an effect." (Alec Guiness plays him in the movie.) The book is in a comic tenor but is less a spoof than a forcible statement of the extent to which military intelligence work and espionage fiction resemble one another.

-- DL

Felix Culpa wins the day

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"Who art thou, then?"

"Part of that Power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good."

-- Goethe, Faust

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Epigraph to The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940). Bulgakov began his novel in 1928 and worked on it for the next twelve years. It did not appear in print until the winter of 1966-67 when it was published in the Russian magazine Moskva. Mirra Gnsburg translated it into English in 1967. Bulgakov, who wrote plays as well as novels, said the he valued equally the dramatic and the narrative impulses just as a pianist needs both his right and his left hand.

-- DL

Ophelia Takes a Powder

Willa Cather lifts the epigraph for her novel A Lost Lady (1923) from Act IV, scene V of Hamlet. Ophelia, leaving the stage, says,

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Come, my coach! Good night, ladies; good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.

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With the exception of the first three words, the same line concludes part II of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land

Tennessee Williams pays homage to Hart Crane

Tennessee Williams chose these lines as the epigraph for A Streetcar Named Desire:

And so it was I entered the broken world

To trace the visionary company of love, its voice

An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)

But not for long to hold each desperate choice.

-- Hart Crane, “The Broken Tower

Appointment in Samarra

Here is the epigraph John O’Hara chose for his novel Appointment in Samarra

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Death Speaks:

There was a merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me.  She looked at me and made a threatening gesture, now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me.  The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went.  Then the merchant went down to the marketplace and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning?  That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise.  I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.

-- W. Somerset Maugham

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DL

JA quotes Pasternak on Mayakovsky

Here is the epigraph John Ashbery chose for his poem "The Picture of Little J. A. in a Prospect of Flowers":

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He was spoilt from childhood by the future, which he mastered rather early and apparently without great difficulty.

-- Boris Pasternak (Safe Conduct)

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Ashbery adapted the title of his poem from Andrew Marvell ("The Picture of Little T. C. in a Prospect of Flowers").

-- DL

The Square Root of Despair

"The specific character of despair is that it is unaware of its despair''

— Kierkegaard

Epigraph to Walker Percy's novel The Moviegoer

--DL

Epigraph III: Fulke Greville

Aldous Huxley chose these lines of the English Renaissancce poet Fulke Greville as the epigraph for the 1928 novel Point Counter Point:

Oh, wearisome conditions of humanity!

Borne under one Law, to another bound,

Vainely begot and yet forbidden vanity:

Created sick, commanded to be sound.

What meaneth Nature by these diverse laws –

Passion and reason, self-division’s cause?

-- DL

Epigraph II (Eliot / Marlowe)

Here is the epigraph T. S. Eliot chose for his poem "Portrait of a Lady":

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Thou hast committed --

Fornication: but that was in another country,

And besides, the wench is dead.

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from The Jew of Malta by Christopher Marlowe (act iv, scene i)

Epigraph of the Month

This is the epigraph that Edgar Allan Poe chose for "The Murders in the Rue Morgue":

"What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, although puzzling questions are not beyond all conjecture." -- Sir Thomas Browne, Urn-Burial

Formidable and fascinating in its own right, the sentence is perfectly apposite to the story it heads.

Poe's example makes me want to launch The Best American Poetry blog with a succinct ode to the art of the epigraph. It involves not only a cunning eye for a great and somewhat out-of-the-way quotation but also a determination to build on the quoted material -- to use it to quicken a new work into being.

T. S. Eliot was terrific at the game. Examples will follow. Meanwhile, I wonder whether others agree with my contention, and if so would they please indicate their own favorite epigraphs?

-- David Lehman