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 specific character of despair is that it is unaware of its despair''
— Kierkegaard
Epigraph to Walker Percy's novel The Moviegoer
--DL
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
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)
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
