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10 Book Titles Based on Lines of Poetry
April is National Poetry Month. The couplets fly, the rhymes collide, and the air is thick with refrains and stanzas, iambic pentameters and hexameters.
Even if you're not a poet, you can find inspiration in verse. Novelists do it all the time. Poems are ripe hunting grounds for writers—and readers!— looking for big ideas and evocative turns of phrase.
To celebrate poems the bookish way, we’ve collected some of the most famous novels with titles taken from lines of poetry. Dig in and get inspired!
Her Fearful Symmetry
by Audrey Niffenegger
"Tyger! Tyger! burning bright,
In the forests of the night
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?"
From The Tyger
by William Blake
Things Fall Apart
by Chinua Achebe
"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold"
From The Second Coming
by William Butler Yeats
The Lovely Bones
by Alice Sebold
"I knew a woman, lovely in her bones
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them"
From I Knew a Woman
by Theodore Roethke
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
by Maya Angelou
"I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee
But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core"
From Sympathy
by Paul Laurence Dunbar
A Handful of Dust
by Evelyn Waugh
"And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust."
From The Waste Land
by T.S. Elliot
Of Mice and Men
by John Steinbeck
"But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain;
The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley"
From To a Mouse
by Robert Burns
The Dark Tower Series
by Stephen King
"Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,
And blew. "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came."
From Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came
by Robert Browning
(Which Browning took from Shakespeare's King Lear)
Let the Great World Spin
by Colum McCann
"Not in vain the distance beacons.
Forward, forward let us range,
Let the great world spin for ever down
The ringing grooves of change."
From Locksley Hall
by Alfred Tennyson
Far From the Madding Crowd
by Thomas Hardy
"Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife
Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray;
Along the cool sequester'd vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way."
From Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
by Thomas Gray
There are many more books titles inspired by lines from poetry—and even more from plays. Check them all out here! Which one is your favorite?
Even if you're not a poet, you can find inspiration in verse. Novelists do it all the time. Poems are ripe hunting grounds for writers—and readers!— looking for big ideas and evocative turns of phrase.
To celebrate poems the bookish way, we’ve collected some of the most famous novels with titles taken from lines of poetry. Dig in and get inspired!
Gone with the Wind
by Margaret Mitchell
"I have forgot much, Cynara! Gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind"
From Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae sub Regno Cynarae
by Ernest Dowson
"I have forgot much, Cynara! Gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind"
From Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae sub Regno Cynarae
by Ernest Dowson
by Audrey Niffenegger
"Tyger! Tyger! burning bright,
In the forests of the night
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?"
From The Tyger
by William Blake
by Chinua Achebe
"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold"
From The Second Coming
by William Butler Yeats
by Alice Sebold
"I knew a woman, lovely in her bones
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them"
From I Knew a Woman
by Theodore Roethke
by Maya Angelou
"I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee
But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core"
From Sympathy
by Paul Laurence Dunbar
by Evelyn Waugh
"And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust."
From The Waste Land
by T.S. Elliot
by John Steinbeck
"But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain;
The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley"
From To a Mouse
by Robert Burns
by Stephen King
"Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,
And blew. "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came."
From Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came
by Robert Browning
(Which Browning took from Shakespeare's King Lear)
by Colum McCann
"Not in vain the distance beacons.
Forward, forward let us range,
Let the great world spin for ever down
The ringing grooves of change."
From Locksley Hall
by Alfred Tennyson
by Thomas Hardy
"Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife
Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray;
Along the cool sequester'd vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way."
From Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
by Thomas Gray
There are many more books titles inspired by lines from poetry—and even more from plays. Check them all out here! Which one is your favorite?
Comments Showing 1-23 of 23 (23 new)
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Rhonda
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Apr 23, 2015 07:28AM
all time fav Gone with the wind
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Gone With the Wind is at the top of my all time favorites list.
Loving this new "blog" feature on my main page. Great content and awesome list!
Cool List! Was just reading The Kilkenny Cats which was also based on an old poem.
Wow! Never knew that about those titles...keep the interesting facts coming!
Read Of Mice And Men at school, great book. Didn't realise it was based off an old poem though.
Norman MclLean's A River Runs Through It is a book filled with poetry loved the flow of the words on the page
all we need of hell by harry crews. from an emily dickinson poem.
gone with the wind and lovely bones!:)
awesome!
You left out so many.... The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner (taken from Macbeth)
As I Lay Dying, Faulkner (taken from Homer, The Odyssey)
Blithe Spirit, Noel Coward (taken from Shelley)
For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway (taken from John Donne)
Oh Pioneers, Willa Cather (taken from Whitman)
A Passage to India, EM Forester (taken from Whitman)
The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck (taken from Battle Hymn of the Republic, Julia Ward Howe)
Elizabeth wrote: "You left out so many.... The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner (taken from Macbeth)
As I Lay Dying, Faulkner (taken from Homer, The Odyssey)
Blithe Spirit, Noel Coward (taken from Shelley)
For..."
Much better list Elizabeth. Guess the bible doesn't count, huh? East of Eden, etc.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North, borrows its title from a Japanese haibun (a prose poem), Oku no Hosomichi, apparently a major text of classic Japanese literature. Although its a title, not a 'line' from a poem, I thought this was a fascinating reference given the subject matter of the book. That said, I still can't think about For Whom the Bell Tolls without thinking, 'Ask not ..... the bell tolls for thee'.
lOVE Gone with the wind!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Not a coincidence that these are beautiful and eloquent titles! Great list.
Mikayla wrote: "Read Of Mice And Men at school, great book. Didn't realise it was based off an old poem though."It may not be - I'm not sure on Of Mice and Men, but I think some of these sharing lines with poems is coincidental.
The Lovely Bones, for example, is kind of a stretch. It isn't the same as lovely IN the bones, and I can see how the title could have been imagined without the poem.
It's not really a stretch -- Just not a direct quote.Of Mice and Men isn't really debatable. No author could choose that title coincidentally. Especially given what the book is about.
READ BOOKS OF NILUTPAL NEOG online @mybookall.com.BOOKS ARE:
-Fragrance of Faded Flower
-The Death hole.etc
Here's another...
A Raisin in the Sun
by Lorraine Hansberry
"What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?"
From Harlem by Langston Hughes
(By the pricking of my thumbs) Something Wicked This Way Comes Shame on you for leaving this one off the list.
