L'État, c'est moi

Entering page 22 of death (the first 21 were on Philip Larkin, the last 20-something will be on Hamlet) I thought I should begin including epigraphs in my essays. It seems that all the well-published literary critics do this, and--although I haven't made a spreadsheet--I'd be willing to bet that the quantity and quality of the epigraphs correlates with the quality, or at least scholarly recognition, of the article itself. JSTOR (for those of you who came of age before internet databases, a searchable database of scholarly articles from hundreds of published journals) just added a new feature where you can see other articles which cite that particular article. So, from now on, I will keep score:

Hypothesis: A higher EPiSoLA (Epigraph Pretension in Scholarly or Literary Articles) will correlate with more citations, and also tenure at a major academic institution. This may also be used for especially pretentious poems or fiction.

The EPiSoLA is calculated on a point scale, as follows:

1 - Epigraph in English or translated living Continental language (e.g., T.S. Eliot, Nicholas Sarkozy)
2 - Epigraph in English by someone dead more than 200 years (e.g., Christopher Marlowe, Adam Smith)
2 - Epigraph in a living Continental language (e.g., Flaubert, Nietzsche)
2 - Epigraph in an non-Continental language, translated (e.g., Omar Khayyam, Sun Tzu)
3 - Epigraph in a living Continental language by someone dead more than 200 years (e.g., Kant, Voltaire)
4 - Epigraph in either Greek or Latin (e.g., Ovid, the Latin Mass)
5 - Epigraph in a living Continental language by either Derrida or Heidegger
10 - Epigraph in Chinese or Persian, actually written with the Chinese or Persian characters (see: anything by Ezra Pound)

I think this covers all the bases. By this account, the article "Bad Taste and Bad Hamlet" receives a 2, for its quote from David Hume, while Basil Bunting's poem "Briggflatts" gets a 5, 3 for "Son los pasariellos del mal pelo exidos," and 1 for "The spuggies are fledged," and 1 bonus point for juxtaposing a 13th-Century Spanish account of Alexander the Great with a Northern English colloquialism.

I encourage all of you to compile your own lists of epigraph pretension. For now, I'm starting out at a healthy 3, with "L'État, c'est moi," or "I am the State," attributed to Louis XIV--you know, because old King Hamlet dies, and thus the characters fight to retain the state of sanity/State of Denmark. Should probably shower/get to the library.