Epigram is the term applied to any very short poem - whether amatory, elegiac, meditative, complimentary, anecdotal, or satiric - which is polished, terse, and pointed; often an epigram ends with a surprising or witty turn of thought. Martial, the Roman epigrammatist, established the enduring model for one of its chief types, the caustically satiric epigram.
The epigram is a species of light verse which was much cultivated in England in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by such poets as John Donne, Ben Jonson, and Robert Herrick. The form flourished especially in the eighteenth century, the time that Austin Dobson described as the age "of wit, of polish, and of Pope." Matthew Prior is one of the most accomplished English epigrammatists, and many of Alexander Pope's closed couplets are detachable epigrams. In the same century, when the exiled Stuarts were still pretenders to the English throne, John Byrom proposed this epigrammatic toast:
And here is one of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's epigrams, to show that Romanticism did not preclude wit:
Many of the short poems of Walter Savage Landor (1885-1864) were fine examples of the nonsatirical epigram. Boileau and Voltaire excelled in the epigram in France, as did Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller in Germany. The form has continued to be cultivated by Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, Roy Campbell, Ogden Nash, and other poets in the present century. (56-57)
Oscar Wilde said that a cynic is "a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." Such a terse, pointed statement is called an epigram. In poetry, however, an epigram is a form: "A short poem ending in a witty or ingenious turn of thought, to which the rest of the composition is intended to lead up" (according to the Oxford English Dictionary). Often it is a milicious gibe with an unexpected stinger in the final line - perhaps in the very last word:
Cultivated by the Roman poet Martial - for whom the epigram was a short poem, sometimes satiric but not always - this form has been especially favored by English poets who love Latin. Few characteristics of the English epigram seem fixed. Its pattern tends to be brief and rimed, its tone playfully merciless.
But blood
was far away
from here -
Money was near.
Oscar Wilde
Max DePree, Leadership is an Art
Irwin Edman (1896-1954):