[Max Goodman]

Or how about this, to flip MacLeish's formula about poems (among which he might not have counted epigrams):

An epigram should mean.

[Erik Olson]

After some years Bohemian came to this—
This Maenad with hair down and gaping kiss
Wild on the barren edge of under fifty.
She would finance his art if he were thrifty.

-J. V. Cunningham

*A Bacchante, a frenzied woman, one among the bands of women worshipers of Baccus in Ancient Greece, &c.

[Julie Steiner]

Yes, still as wonderful as it was earlier in this thread.

[Erik Olson]

Haha. It doesn't seem anyone's posted this one though.

Epitaph for Someone or Other

Naked I came, naked I leave the scene,
And naked was my pastime in between.

-J. V. Cunningham

[Julie Steiner]

Okay, you've redeemed yourself with that one, Erik.

[Susan McLean]

Since we are on a Cunningham streak, here is one of my favorites of his (content warning!), which is very Martial-like but not a translation.

Lip was a man who used his head.
He used it when he went to bed
With his friend's wife, and with his friend,
With either sex at either end.

--J. V. Cunningham

[Erik Olson]

In this epigram Jonson satirizes a spiteful "courtling" who condemns his work with a fashionable faintness of approbation, or sets himself up as a censorious critic to gain a reputation for wit. The same thing Jonson satirizes here is found in Lucian's recommendation to the courtier in The Rhetorician's Vade Mecum, Fowler:

And then do not wave your hand too much-warm approval is rather low: and as to jumping up, never do it more than once or twice. A slight smile is your best expression; make it clear that you do not think much of the thing.

So, Pope's "Damn with faint praise," &c.*

LII. — To Censorious Courtling

COURTLING, I rather thou shouldst utterly
Dispraise my work, than praise it frostily:
When I am read, thou feign'st a weak applause,
As if thou wert my friend, but lackd'st a cause.
This but thy judgement fools: the other way
Would both thy folly, and thy spite betray.

*An Epistle to Arbuthnot

Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,
And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer; [...]
.

[Erik Olson]

Epigram I.


Think of your conception, you'll soon forget
what Plato puffs you up with, all that
'immortality' and 'divine life' stuff.

Man, why dost thou think of Heaven? Nay
consider thine origins in common clay

's one way of putting it but not blunt enough.

Think of your father, sweating, drooling, drunk,
you, his spark of lust, his spurt of spunk.


by Tonny Harrison

[ross hamilton hill]

I have always loved some of Oscar Wilde's epigrams, none of which (to my knowledge) are poems. Two are:

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

and

I can resist everything but temptation.

I also think Dorothy Parker is hard to beat.

Four be the things I'd have been better without:
Love, curiosity, freckles and doubt.

and of course

Men seldom make passes
at girls who wear glassses.

[Douglas G. Brown]

W. S. Gilbert has many choice epigrams buried in his dramatic verse.

My favorite is Things are seldom as they seem / Skim milk masquerades as cream.