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Faber Book of Epigrams and Epitaphs

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Epigrams
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Product details

  • ISBN 9780571242832
  • Weight: 372g
  • Dimensions: 135 x 216mm
  • Publication Date: 21 Aug 2008
  • Publisher: Faber & Faber
  • Publication City/Country: GB
  • Product Form: Paperback
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Description

Triumphant Demons stand, and Angels start,
To see the abysses of the human heart. -- Landor

English poetry is supposed to be short in epigrams. But here there is a choice of more than 700 epigrams and epitaphs (which are epigrams of a special kind) from the sixteenth century to our time, familiar, unfamiliar, and even unknown. This ancient art of witty and satirical and also tender compression - an art as old as Plato and as young as the youngest living poet - has found its English masters in Herrick, Prior, Pope, Blake, Burns, Walter Savage Landor, Patmore and in twentieth-century masters Belloc and Robert Graves, all poets of strong liking or disliking. But poet after poet, major and minor and anon, has hated, loved, laughed, ridiculed, in couplets and quatrains, taking his cue from the great Latin epigrammatist Martial, from the Latin epigrammatists of the Renaissance (in Elizabethan times every Winchester schoolboy was expecting to be able to write a neat Latin epigram) or from the Greek Anthology of from his own English (and French) predecessors.

Here lie the bones of Elizabeth Charlotte,
That was born a virgin and died a harlot.
She was aye a virgin at seventeen,
An extraordinary thing for Aberdeen. -- Anon

He served his God so faithfully and well
That now he sees him face to face, in hell. -- Belloc
About Various
Geoffrey Grigson, poet and writer, was born in Cornwall in 1905. After (in his words) "a profitless sojourn" at Oxford University, he worked as literary journalist and critic. His best journalism was collected in The Contrary View (1974) and Blessings, Kicks and Curses (1982), while The Harp of Aeolus (1947) and his book on Samuel Palmer (1947) contains some of his finest writing on art. His trio of poetry anthologies (Before the Romantics, The Romantics and The Victorians) were universally heralded for their careful and original selection. His first book of poetry was Several Observations (1939) and his Collected Poems was published in 1963. He had four children and was married three times, lastly to Jane McIntire, who, as Jane Grigson, became a celebrated cookery expert. He died in 1985.

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