The Age of Citation

What's the deal with all the epigraphs used in modern poetry? The New York Times investigates.

From the piece...

Consider Liz Waldner’s recent collection, “Trust.” First, we’re presented with epigraphs from Lewis Carroll and Karl Marx that are presumably meant to cover the book as a whole; then we have an epigraph from Samuel Johnson that’s meant to apply to Section 1; and finally, we have an epigraph from Plato’s “Symposium” in the first poem. So that’s four writers we’ve encountered before we’ve read one line from the author.

To be fair to Waldner, this tally is by no means unusual: a quick survey of recent collections on my bookshelf yields opening pronouncements from Wallace Stevens, Walter Benjamin, Shakespeare, Karl Marx (again), James Schuyler, Don DeLillo, Gertrude Stein, Chekhov, Ovid, Dickinson, Sappho, the Wu-men kuan, Theodore Roethke and the 18th-­century art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Randall Jarrell said his generation lived in the age of criticism; we apparently live in the age of citation.

Why is that? 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 while epigraphs have always been a part of poetic tradition, they do seem to be unusually thick on the ground these days, and not just in America — as the Canadian poet and critic Carmine Starnino wryly noted in the January issue of Poetry magazine: “Lately it seems no book of Canadian poetry can be put to bed without an epigraph to tuck it in.”