7 Book titles based on lines of poetry

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.

There are many books titles inspired by lines from poetry, to celebrate poems the bookish way, here are some of the most famous novels with titles taken from lines of poetry. Dig in and get inspired!

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"

"Things Fall Apart" title culled from 'The Second Coming' by William Butler Yeats

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"

"Gone with the Wind" title culled From 'Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae sub Regno Cynarae' by Ernest Dowson

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."

"Far From The Madding Crowd" title taken from 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard' by Thomas Gray

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"

"I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings" title taken from 'Sympathy' by Paul Laurence Dunbar

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."

"The Dark Tower Series" title gotten from 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower' Came by Robert Browning

(Which Browning took from Shakespeare's King Lear)

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

"One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs,

Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her wall"

"A Thousand Splendid Title was gotten from the poem 'Kabul' by Saib-e-Tabrizi.

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?"

"A Raisin in the Sun" title was From 'Harlem' by Langston Hughes