The Top Ten Epigrams of All Time

In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.—Albert Camus

It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness.—Eleanor Roosevelt

If you can't be a good example, you'll just have to be a horrible warning.—Catherine the Great

If life were fair, Elvis would be alive and his impersonators would be dead.—Johnny Carson

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.—Oscar Wilde

To err is human, but it feels divine.—Mae West

An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.—Mohandas Gandhi

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.—Virginia Woolf

I'm not offended by dumb blonde jokes because I'm not dumb, and also I'm not blonde.—Dolly Parton

He does not believe, who does not live according to his belief.—Sigmund Freud



In April 2014 A Poet’s Glossary by Academy Chancellor Edward Hirsch was published. As Hirsch writes in the preface, “this book—one person’s work, a poet’s glossary—has grown, as if naturally, out of my lifelong interest in poetry, my curiosity about its vocabulary, its forms and genres, its histories and traditions, its classical, romantic, and modern movements, its various outlying groups, its small devices and large mysteries—how it works.” Each week we will feature a term and its definition from Hirsch’s new book.

epigram: From the Greek epigramma, “to write upon.” An epigram is a short, witty poem or pointed saying. Ambrose Bierce defined it in The Devil’s Diction­ary (1881–1911) as “a short, sharp saying in prose and verse.” In Hellenistic Greece (third century B.C.E.), the epigram developed from an inscription carved in a stone monument or onto an object, such as a vase, into a literary genre in its own right. It may have developed out of the proverb. The Greek Anthology (tenth century, fourteenth century) is filled with more than fifteen hundred epigrams of all sorts, including pungent lyrics on the pleasures of wine, women, boys, and song.

Ernst Robert Curtius writes in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1953): “No poetic form is so favorable to playing with pointed and sur­prising ideas as epigram—for which reason seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Germany called it ‘Sinngedicht.’ This development of the epigram necessarily resulted after the genre ceased to be bound by its original defi­nition (an inscription for the dead, for sacrificial offerings, etc.).” Curtius relates the interest in epigrams to the development of the “conceit” as an aesthetic concept.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge defined the epigram in epigrammatic form (1802):

What is an epigram? A dwarfish whole;
Its body brevity and wit its soul.

The pithiness, wit, irony, and sometimes harsh tone of the English epigram derive from the Roman poets, especially Martial, known for his caustic short poems, as in 1.32 (85–86 B.C.E.): “Sabinus, I don’t like you. You know why? / Sabinus, I don’t like you. That is why.”

The epigram is brief and pointed. It has no particular form, though it often employs a rhymed couplet or quatrain, which can stand alone or serve as part of a longer work. Here is Alexander Pope’s “Epigram from the French” (1732):

Sir, I admit your general rule,
That every poet is a fool:
But you yourself may serve to show it,
That every fool is not a poet.

Geoffrey Hartman points out that there are two diverging traditions of the epigram. These were classified by J. C. Scaliger as mel and fel (Poetics Libri Septem, 1561), which have been interpreted as sweet and sour, sugar and salt, naïve and pointed. Thus Robert Hayman, echoing Horace’s idea that poetry should be both “dulce et utile,” sweet and useful, writes in Quodlibets (1628):

Short epigrams relish both sweet and sour,
Like fritters of sour apples and sweet flour.

The “vinegar” of the epigram was often contrasted with the “honey” of the sonnet, especially the Petrarchan sonnet, though the Shakespearean sonnet, with its pointed final couplet, also combined the sweet with the sour. “By a natural development,” Hartman writes, “since epigram and sonnet were not all that distinct, the pointed style often became the honeyed style raised to a higher power, to preciousness. A new opposition is frequently found, not between sugared and salty, but between pointed (precious, over­written) and plain.”

The sometimes sweet, sometimes sour, and sometimes sweet-and-sour epigram has been employed by contemporary American formalists, such as Howard Nemerov, X. J. Kennedy, and especially J. V. Cunningham. Here is a two-line poem that Cunningham translated in 1950 from the Welsh epi­grammatist John Owen (1.32, 1606):

Life flows to death as rivers to the sea,
And life is fresh and death is salt to me.

Excerpted from A Poet’s Glossary by Edward Hirsch. Copyright © 2014 by Edward Hirsch. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.



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A Poet’s Glossary
Each week we feature a new term from Academy Chancellor Edward Hirsch’...

This old house, made of the bones of memories,
sits on top of a dark hill
overlooking a river that runs black.
The lawn is yellow, patchy,
even the weeds don’t grow well.
I’ve heard of the stories about this house,
that it’s inhabited by the ghosts
of bitter words and the starvation of hope.
I used to live in this old house
on top of the dark hill.
I’m the only one who escaped.

The kitchen is fully stocked,
boxes of cereal on the counter
covered in several years’ worth of dust,
cobwebs crowding the top of the windows.
My brother died in this room when he was six,
choked to death on a sweet,
I having left the packet unattended.
Don’t know if he’s still running around
in the memory of this place anymore,
I can’t feel him here causing mischief.

The living room floor is covered in old books,
Dostoevsky, Dickens, Bierce and Wilde.
The Devil’s Dictionary sits proudly on the coffee table
but I doubt even the Devil has a word for what happened here.
My father hanged himself from the ceiling fan,
after work, his tie round his neck.
I had caused the death of my brother a few weeks before
and I don’t think my father could take it anymore.
He never left a note, never attempted to absolve me
of any guilt I may have felt, he just threw his hands up in defeat.

Up the old staircase, creaking like it always used to do,
so out of breath for something so stationary,
exerting tremendous energy keeping us upright and upward bound.
The bathroom door is still open, the light not working.
No window in here, feels more like a prison now.
This is where my mother, after drinking a glass of wine
to wash down a few too many antidepressants,
drowned as she listened to my father’s favourite song.
I could hear the music through the door
and heard her submerge beneath the gentle waves of her swaying foot,
but I made no attempt to stop her.
You fight a losing battle if you try to halt the passage of time.

Into what may have once been my bedroom.
The Batman sheets still on my bed,
the smell of night terrors still clinging on
to the musty thick air of fear and tragedy.
This is where I knew I would die, beside my family,
at peace with all the universe could ever throw at me.
This is where it should all come full circle,
where I caused so much pain and grief through a minor mistake.
I have heard the rumours about this old house
on top of the dark hill, ghosts of memories,
flocks of dead birds swarming overhead.
The crying heard during the night in a room no one can find.
The splashing of water in an empty bathtub.
The man on the bed staring down infinity.

Don’t come to this old house,
there is nothing here.