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The Ghosts of Epigram, False Wit, and the Augustan Mode

Following Addison’s guidance in the Spectator, nos. 58–62 (May 1711), modern readers of eighteenth-century poetry have been trained to recognize puns, anagrams, and acrostics as forms of false wit. Critics have had far less to say about the status of epigram, however, a poetic form advertised in virtually every eighteenth-century miscellany even as critics called its legitimacy into question. Even Pope, who condemns epigram as a “disgrace of human Wit, Morality and Decency,” nevertheless produced a significant number of memorable epigrams that were widely reprinted in precisely the sorts of miscellanies he condemns in the Dunciad. Since each epigram might have been reprinted in any number of the