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From Epigraphs: Famous First Words by Herbert Mitgang.

Epigraphs, those brilliant quotations from past masters or pungent sayings by contemporaries that appear between the title page and Chapter One, are an author's way of saying, ''I am walking in the footsteps of literary tradition and possibly greatness.'' Sometimes the epigraph is so good, in fact, that it says more, more briefly, than the book itself - hardly the author's intention.

''Epigraph'' - sometimes confused with ''epitaph,'' a commemorative line or verse inscribed on a tombstone - is derived from the Greek word for an inscription on a building or statue. The champion modern supplier of epigraphs may be William Butler Yeats. For example, Norman Mailer's ''Ancient Evenings'' begins with these words from Yeats's essay ''Ideas of Good and Evil'': ''I believe in the practice and philosophy of what we have agreed to call magic, in what I must call the evocation of spirits, though I do not know what they are, in the power of creating magical illusions, in the visions of truth in the depths of the mind when the eyes are closed.''

Yeats's poems are the great source of titles as well as epigraphs. ''The Second Coming'' is full of phrases that have ended up on the jackets of such books as Joan Didion's collection of essays ''Slouching Towards Bethlehem'' and Joseph Frank's book of criticism ''The Widening Gyre.'' William Maxwell's novel ''They Came Like Swallows'' derives both title and epigraph from Yeats's lines ''They came like swallows and like swallows went, / And yet a woman's powerful character / Could keep a swallow to its first intent.'' Yeats's famous line ''The center cannot hold'' could serve as an all-purpose epigraph for half the political books published these days.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, without crediting Keats, found both epigraph and title for ''Tender Is the Night'' in ''Ode to a Nightingale'': ''Already with thee! tender is the night. / . . . / But here there is no light. / Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown, / Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.'' For his new novel, ''The World Is Made of Glass,'' Morris West altered Ralph Waldo Emerson slightly: ''Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass. . . . Some damning circumstance always transpires.''

Ernest Hemingway's best-known epigraph, taken from John Donne, also became the title for his novel ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'': ''No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine . . . . And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. '' Hemingway chose his epigraphs carefully. He used two that worked in tandem for ''The Sun Also Rises.'' The first was from a conversation with Gertrude Stein: ''You are all a lost generation.'' (At one point he thought of calling the novel ''The Lost Generation.'') And following it came an excerpt from Ecclesiastes that gave him his title: ''One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever. The sun also ariseth.'' Biblical epigraphs abound. ''The Young Lions'' by Irwin Shaw is indebted to Nahum 2: ''Behold, I am against thee, saith the Lord of hosts, and I will burn her chariots in the smoke, and the sword shall devour thy young lions.'' For ''A Month of Sundays,'' John Updike found this line in the 45th Psalm: ''My tongue is the pen of a ready writer.'' For her novel ''Family Happiness,'' Laurie Colwin turned to Psalm 68: ''God setteth the solitary in families.''