What is the difference between an aphorism and an epigram? Epigrams usually rhyme, are often funny and cynical, and are often intended to castigate or criticize a rival. When they are also philosophical, they are aphorisms. Martial (Geary’s Guide, pp. 293-294) is the Western author most closely a...

Richard Greene started writing aphorisms after noticing that a line in one of his poems read like an aphorism — a self-contained gnomic utterance. (For a consideration of poems as aphorisms, see my discussion with Neil Denny of Emily Dickinson, Dorothy Parker, and Samuel Hoffenstein on the Little...

The video of my appearance at the Charleston (SC) Literary Festival back in November was recently posted, which gives me an opportunity to once again thank Diana Reich, Sarah Moriarty, and the whole Charleston Literary Festival team, especially the crew at the splendid Dock Street Theatre who got...

After retiring from a career in healthcare and becoming “a rather late in life poet,” Charles R. Castle developed a fascination with aphorisms during the pandemic, a fascination fueled by W.S. Merwin’s translations in Asian Figures and his Voices of Antonio Porchia (see The World in a Phrase, pp ...

Thanks to Neil Denny for such a fun, wide-ranging conversation on the Little Atoms podcast, largely structured around consideration of individual aphorists from the book, including Jesus (12:00-14:50), Jean Toomer (20:00-22:05), Emily Dickinson, Dorothy Parker and Samuel Hoffenstein (24:15-26-35)...