I was thinking about how you can’t copyright a title, which explains why there are so many books and movies with the same titles. Does this extend to not being able to legally prevent someone from using a line of poetry (not the title of the poem) as the title of their book? Assuming that’s true, can you think of any book titles like that?
If it’s short enough to be used as the title of a book, then it’s probably the kind of short phrase that isn’t subject to copyright law.
See here – What Does Copyright Protect? (FAQ) | U.S. Copyright Office
and here – http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ34.pdf –
That brings up the age-old question: are song lyrics poetry? Because while I am certain that there have been novels with titles taken from song lyrics, tho I cant think of any now, I myself have almost completed a novel whose title references a song. So on the offhand chance I should get published I might count!
**Wally Lamb **uses song lyrics for the titles of all of his books:
She’s Come Undone (from “Undun” by The Guess Who)
I Know This Much is True (From the song by the same name by Spandau Ballet)
The Hour I First Believed (from Amazing Grace)
**The Widening Gyre, **by Robert Parker, a Spencer novel.
From the William Butler Yeats poem, The Second Coming.
A fair number of Star Trek (TOS at least) episode titles were bits from poems or plays.
If you just want a phrase taken from poetry used as a book title, there are tons of these. Here’s a list from Shakespeare alone. If you want an entire line, that narrows it down a bit, but there must be some.
Which reminds me of The Golden Apples of the Sun by Ray Bradbury.
And reminds me of almost every Spencer novel.
There’s Lord of the Rings from Beowulf.
And reminds me of Things Fall Apart.
I came into this thread to post The Widening Gyre.
Not to mention Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion.
And Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls is from a John Donne poem.
Or, for that matter, Something Wicked This Way Comes.
If we expand to short stories, then just off the top of my head, there’s also “Inconstant Moon”, by Niven, and “That Thou Should Pay Homage to him”, by Asimov (both Shakespeare also).
I believe the poem that produced the most titles is Andrew Marvell’s "To His Coy Mistress."Some that I know of:
World enough, and time
By the tide of Humber
Vaster than empires, and more slow
A fine and private place
Time’s winged chariot
I imagine there might be more, though it looks like “The Iron Gates of Life” is available to all you writers out there.
As to the copyright issue – using a line of a poem for a title is generally considered fair use, since a major factor is how much of the work is taken. I doubt anyone has ever called an author on it, even if the poem was copyrighted.
Norman Spinrad had a story called “No Direction Home” and used it as a title for an anthology of his stories, but Bob Dylan never made an issue of it.
John Barth named The Sot-Weed Factor after a poem by the same name.
And, indeed, from the same verse, The Centre Cannot Hold by Brian Stableford
I’d be curious to hear what titles you’re thinking of.
*Non Sum Qualis eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae *by Ernest Dowson.
The third stanza:
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;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
Another MacBeth reference: Alistair Maclean’s The Way to Dusty Death