![I n mid-August, academic Leigh Claire La Berge posed a question on X about epigraphs: “do [they] ever work?” While she enjoys “finding them and](https://walrus-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/img/Isen_Epigraphs-1800.jpg "What’s the Point of Epigraphs Anyway?")
What’s the Point of Epigraphs Anyway?
I n mid-August, academic Leigh Claire La Berge posed a question on X about epigraphs: “do [they] ever work?” While she enjoys “finding them and dropping them in [her] prose,” the post continued, rarely does she like them as a reader. Epigraphs—the short quotes that preface a book or chapter and invoke its theme—attract a volume and intensity of discourse that belie the device’s small stature. Predictably, the responses to La Berge’s post were swift and impassioned. People defended their use of epigraphs, lamented their existence, and cursed the things for being so expensive—“I still regret those 11 overpriced words I once bought from the Graham Greene estate,” said one disgruntled writer. The accusation self-indulgent was slung more than once. The only clear throughline to emerge seemed to be that “Do they or don’t they work?” was too neat a question.
When pressed to describe what an epigraph does, writers tend to reach for metaphor. In her newsletter Before and After the Book Deal, Courtney Maum calls them, decadently, “apéritifs” and “a spritz of fragrance in a large room.” Thomas Swick conjures grandiosity in Literary Hub: an epigraph is “a ceremonial gate ushering us into the realm of the author,” a book devoid of one “a man in a suit who’s not wearing a tie.” Carmine Starnino, editor-in-chief of The Walrus, is more concise in a 2010 issue of Poetry magazine—epigraphs are “emoticons,” he sniffs; “a curio” that deserves “a little more judiciousness” when a writer ponders whether or not to include it. “They’re like the salt on yer chips!” reads one characterful reply to La Berge’s question.
