“I can resist everything except temptation.” So wrote Oscar Wilde, perhaps unsurpassed in English in the art of the epigram. This particular example perfectly illustrates the definition of this word: “a pithy saying or remark expressing an idea in a clever and amusing way.”
Certain poems are also regarded as epigrammatic. Here’s “Ironist” by American poet Bruce Bennett:
I mean the opposite of what I say.
You’ve got it now? No, it’s the other way.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge even wrote an epigram defining this form by demonstration:
What is an Epigram? A dwarfish whole,
Its body brevity, and wit its soul….