Using an Epigraph in Poem Contests: Yes or No?
Should your contest entry carry an epigraph or a dedication? A judge explains when a quote above a poem helps, when it sinks the entry, and the five questions to ask before keeping one.
The most memorable epigraph I ever saw on a contest entry was four lines of Rumi, radiant and vast, sitting above a sixteen line poem that could not lift them. The entry read like a garden shed built onto a cathedral. I have thought about that submission for years, not because the poem was bad, it was decent, but because without the borrowed lines it would have scored two points higher. The question of whether to use an epigraph in poem submissions comes up constantly in our inbox, usually paired with its cousin: can I dedicate my entry to someone? A judge's honest answer to both is the same. Usually no. Occasionally, powerfully, yes. The difference is learnable.
What an Epigraph Actually Promises
An epigraph is not decoration and it is not a mood board. Formally, it is a quotation placed between the title and the first line, and functionally it is a claim: the poem below is in conversation with the lines above, and the conversation will be worth the interruption. Our glossary entry on the epigraph covers the mechanics; what it cannot cover is the wager involved.
An epigraph is a bet that your poem can out-sing the quote above it. Most poems lose that bet.
Think about what you are doing when you place Rumi, Dickinson, or Neruda at the top of your entry. You are handing the judge a masterpiece as a warm up act for your own work. The comparison is now unavoidable, and you chose it. When poets tell me the epigraph sets the tone, I believe them, but tone setting is the poem's own first job, and outsourcing your opening move to a greater writer announces that your first line could not do it alone.
T. S. Eliot could hang Dante above The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and survive the comparison. That is the standard. It is worth being honest about how rarely any of us, me included, clear it.
When an Epigraph in Poem Contests Earns Its Place
Against all that, there are three cases where the borrowed lines genuinely work, and when they work, they work hard.
- The argument. Your poem talks back. The epigraph says time heals all wounds, and your poem spends twenty lines proving it wrong. Here the quote is not a warm up act but an opponent, and the tension is the engine. These are the epigraphs I score up rather than down.
- The essential context. A found poem built from a shipping manifest, a response to a specific news event, a poem in a dead relative's voice: sometimes one line of framing is the difference between comprehension and confusion, and an epigraph delivers it more gracefully than a clunky explanatory first stanza would.
- The reclaimed line. Quoting something said to you, an insult, a diagnosis, a line from a letter, and building the poem as your answer. Technically an epigraph, emotionally a door being walked back through. Devastating when done plainly.
Notice what all three share: the poem needs the quote structurally, not atmospherically. If you deleted the epigraph and the poem still made complete sense, the epigraph was mood lighting, and mood lighting on a contest entry is weight you cannot afford.
A Worked Example: The Same Poem, With and Without
Here is a micro poem I wrote to test the argument case. First, bare:
The scar has learned to forecast rain.
Twelve years, and it still clears its throat
each autumn, politely, like a guest
who knows the house better than I do.
Readable, complete, a little mysterious. Now with an epigraph above it: Time heals all wounds.
Suddenly the poem is an argument. The scar that forecasts weather twelve years on is now direct evidence against the proverb, the politeness of the guest turns ironic, and the last line lands as a quiet verdict: the wound holds seniority in the body. Four lines gained a spine because the epigraph gave them something to push against. That is the test in miniature. This epigraph earns its place; four lines of Rumi about the soul's yearning would have crushed the same little poem flat.
Dedications Are a Different Animal
A dedication, for my mother, for J., makes no literary promise, so it cannot be broken the same way. My objection to dedications in contest entries is more practical, and I hold it strongly: a dedication usually smuggles in context the poem should be carrying itself. If the poem only becomes moving once we know it is for your late grandmother, then the poem, as an object, is not yet moving. The dedication is doing load bearing work from outside the walls, and a judge who covers it with a thumb, which is effectively what scoring does, sees the structure sag.
There is also a colder problem. Many contests, ours included, judge blind, and a dedication that names people or reveals identifying details can compromise anonymity, and in strict cases gets an entry set aside on a technicality before anyone weighs its merits. The saddest disqualifications are always the accidental ones. Check the rules of any contest you enter; when the rules are silent, leave the dedication for the version you frame for the person, which is, truthfully, where it belongs. The framed copy is the right home for love. The contest copy has to survive among strangers.
The Five Question Test Before You Keep One
Before your entry goes out with anything between the title and line one, put it through this sequence.
- Delete it and reread. If the poem still makes complete sense, the epigraph fails the necessity test. Cut it and move on; you have your answer in thirty seconds.
- Name the relationship. Argument, essential context, or reclaimed line? If you cannot place it in one of the three working categories, it is atmosphere, and atmosphere goes.
- Check the comparison you are inviting. Read the epigraph aloud, then your first stanza. If your ear drops on the transition, the judge's will too.
- Check the rights and the rules. Quote pre 1928 work or a source you have rights to, and confirm the contest permits quoted material and that nothing in it breaks anonymity. One line of a living songwriter's lyrics can make an otherwise clean entry unpublishable.
- Ask what you are afraid of. This is the real one. Most epigraphs I see are armor: the poet suspects the poem is not enough and calls in reinforcements. If that is the fear, revise the poem. Borrowed authority has never once, in my scoring life, rescued weak lines.
What a Judge Actually Does at the Top of Your Page
Here is the lived moment, since I promised honesty. Last winter I opened an entry carrying a long epigraph from a famous contemporary poet, lines I love. My first reaction was pleasure, at the quote. My second, within seconds, was arithmetic: the entry now had to be better than the best thing on its own page, and it was not, and I felt the score settle before I reached line five. That is unfair in a way, and it is also exactly how reading works. Meanwhile the highest score I gave that month went to a poem with nothing above line one, which opened so well it needed no introduction from anyone. Browse our past winners and count the epigraphs. The pattern will not surprise you now.
If you do keep one, one is the limit. Stacked epigraphs on a single short poem read like a nervous throat clearing, twice, before a speech that then had better be extraordinary.
Let the Poem Stand in Its Own Weather
The deeper principle under all this: a contest entry is the one context where your poem must survive completely alone, no author bio, no backstory, no famous friends at the top of the page vouching for it. That exposure is uncomfortable, and it is also the entire value of entering. Each month our contest returns a five part score on creativity, emotion, structure, language, and theme to every poet who enters between the 1st and the 25th, which means you find out precisely what the poem accomplishes unassisted. Strip the scaffolding, send the poem by itself, and let the scores tell you what it can lift. If it truly needs those four lines of Rumi to stand, you have not finished a poem yet. You have finished a frame, and the best thing in it belongs to someone else.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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