This is the epigraph that Edgar Allan Poe chose for “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”:
“What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, although puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture.” — Sir Thomas Browne, Urn-Burial
Formidable and fascinating in its own right, the sentence is perfectly apposite to the story it heads.
Poe’s example makes me want to compose a succinct ode to the art of the epigraph, which involves not only a cunning eye for a great and somewhat out-of-the-way quotation but also a determination to build on the quoted material — to use it to quicken a new work into being.
T. S. Eliot was terrific at the game.
Here is the epigraph Adous Huxley used for Point Counter Point:
‘Oh, wearisome condition of humanity!
Born under one law, to another bound,
Vainly begot and yet forbidden vanity:
Created sick, commanded to be sound.
What meaneth Nature by these diverse laws—
Passion and reason, self-division’s cause?’
—Fulke Greville
Joseph Conrad chose these lines from Edmund Spenser’s The Faeire Queene for his epitaph:
“Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas,
Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please”
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Author: The Best American Poetry
