Poetry News

Famous Book Titles Took Their Famous Book Titles from Poetry

Originally Published: March 01, 2012

What's that? 12 Famous Book Titles That Come From Poetry? Oh, Publisher's Weekly. Thank you. Here goes:

1. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold comes from “I Knew a Woman” by Theodore Roethke

I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,

When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;

Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:

The shapes a bright container can contain!

2. A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh comes from The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot

…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.

....

5. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy comes from “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” by Thomas Gray

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.

6. Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust comes from “Sonnet 30″ by William Shakespeare

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

I summon up remembrance of things past,

I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,

And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:

Did we know that one? I feel like we did. More more more.