Don't quote us

"Imagine that this essay began not with the sentence you’re reading, but with the following observation, attributed to Wittgenstein." So David Orr begins his New York Times Book Review essay on epigraphs. He writes that contemporary poets have developed a taste for citations—Liz Waldner, for example, starts off her recent volume, "Trust," with no fewer than four quotations.

Why? As for so many problems, blame Chaucer:

In part, our abundance of epigraphs is simply a function of poets doing what poets have always done. Chaucer opened “The Knight’s Tale” with a quotation from the Roman poet Statius; Alexander Pope began the 1743 version of the “Dunciad” with an epigraph from Ovid; and Keats prefaced his ­“Poems” with a quotation from Spenser (as well as a drawing of Shakespeare’s head).

But, Orr continues, "while epigraphs have always been a part of poetic tradition, they do seem to be unusually thick on the ground these days" -- a condition he attributes to that master quoter T. S. Eliot. He focuses on one theorist's analysis of epigraphs, particularly the idea that they help the author choose "his peers and thus his place in the pantheon”:

Like all literary genres, poetry is constantly in the business of positioning itself — of reminding us what poems are, and how they’re to be read. And as Eliot understood, epigraphs can assist in this process by acting as a shorthand for tradition. But traditions aren’t all the same size or shape. When T. S. Eliot quotes Dante and Heraclitus, it’s because Eliot wants to be seen as binding together thousands of years of Western culture. When a contemporary poet quotes the same authors, however, it’s more likely that he wants to be seen (whether he knows it or not) as T. S. Eliot. That’s not a bad thing, of course. But it does reflect a change in the way that Eliot’s signature device is being deployed: once a symbol of ambition, the epigraph is now more likely to be an indication of community. It tells us less about whom a poet hopes to equal and more about where he’d like to hang out.

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