Epigraphs

[Lycidas at worldnet.att.net]

In the beginning was the pun, said Beckett. And the pun went
across our titles and epigraphs and flooded our texts with
references. The pun always needs to sink its roots into a
dense network of tacit knowledge, without which it does not
subsist. We are surrounded by tradition. 

http://www.udl.es/usuaris/s2430206/pumby/abstract.htm


Epigraph: 
 
    A brief quotation which appears at the beginning of a
literary work. The following is the epigraph from T. S.
Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Quoted from
Dante Allighieri's epic poem "The Inferno," the speaker,
Guido di Montefeltrano, believing Dante to be another soul
condemned to Hell, replies thus to a question: 

      If I believed my answer were being given
      to someone who could ever return to the world,
      this flame (his voice is represented by a moving
flame) would shake no more.
      But since no one has ever returned
      alive from this depth, if what I hear is true,
      I will answer you without fear of infamy.

"April is the cruelest month...." allusion to Chaucer, and
again Chaucer's April is Ironic. Later in GR, Pynchon will
play on Eliot's use of Dante again, first with a fragment
"thought to be from the Gospel of Thomas" and "Who would
have thought so many would be here?" 


Now a critic could turn this again, by writing an essay on
Pynchon's Hells in GR with the following epigraph: "Who
would have though so many readers would be here?" 

Critics can be as witty as novelists and poets sometimes. 

Yeat's "The Second Coming" has become a favorite insult for
critics, McHoul and Wills insult McHale with it, another
critic insults James Wood with it, it is the epigraph of the
recent and most controversial book about Classics: 

The epigraph to "Who Killed Homer?"   The Demise of
Classical Education and the recovery of Greek Wisdom By
Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath.

  "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of
passionate intensity." 




Epigraph from Joyce Carol Oats's "The Hungry Ghosts"
                            


Satire is a sort of Glass, wherein Beholders do generally
discover everybody's Face but their own. . . .

                            Jonathan Swift, The Battle of
the Books


. . Surely a man may speak truth with a smiling countenance.

                            Henry Fielding, Tom Jones



What of Huxley's BNW Epigraph?