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The paper investigates aphorism in English critical writings by poets and critics through the centuries. At its most successful in its verse form, aphorism can be said to aim at a scriptural felicity which evidences both its success in terms of clarification and failure in so far as such success makes it verge on the ideological. The interest of Howard Barker’s liminal practice is that it lays bare the oxymoronic tensions at work in aphorism, and so enlightens us as to our own use of such types of writing.