Aha! I thought of this book, but when I looked in my Bartlett’s for “confederacy” there was no reference to dunces.
Possibly also a reference to Cain and Abel.
Paul Bowles’ novel, “Let It Come Down.”
From Macbeth.
Banquo: “It will be rain tonight.”
First Murderer: “Let it come down.”
Also a biblical reference: In the Old Testament, the Prophet Elijah, instead of dying, was carried bodily into Heaven in a flaming chariot.
(2 Kings 2:11-12)
Cool. Undoubtedly what William Blake had in mind.
Side note….Blake’s poem was set to music and, under the title “Jerusalem” is practically a 2nd national anthem for the British. So the film’s title reference would be as glaringly obvious to the Brits as “Home of the Brave” would be to Americans.
In a thread last year I gave an example from Shakespeare in which every line spawned titles for science fiction stories. @Q.Q.Switcheroo riposted with a stanza from poetry that had equal influence.
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (novel) [a great book]
Elyn R. Saks, The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness (memoir)
Woody Allen, Mere Anarchy (humor)
Jesse Kauffman, The Blood-Dimmed Tide: Central Europe’s Long Great War, 1905–1921 (history)
Robert Ribman, The Ceremony of Innocence (play)
Not to mention Slouching Toward Bethlehem (essays) by Joan Dideon and What Rough Beast, a novel by William John Watkins.
William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned…
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
The Captains and the Kings, by Taylor Caldwell, has a title from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Recessional”.
Two I can think of from Thomas Gray’s poem “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”:
Humphrey Cobb and Jeffrey Archer both wrote novels called Paths of Glory
Thomas Hardy wrote a novel called Far from the Madding Crowd
A number of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels have this type of title, including:
Mortal Stakes: “Two Tramps in Mud-Time”, by Robert Frost
Taming a Sea-horse: “My Last Duchess”, by Robert Browning
Pale Kings and Princes: “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”, by John Keats
redaCTED
Wikipedia has a page called List of book titles taken from literature. I didn’t create the page but I recall adding several of the entries over a period of years, back when I still saw the point of editing pages there. I don’t remember them all, but I’m pretty sure one of my additions was Captains Courageous from “The Ballad of Mary Ambree”:
WHEN captains couragious, whom death could not daunte,
Did march to the siege of the citty of Gaunt,
They muster’d their souldiers by two and by three,
And the foremost in battle was Mary Ambree.
Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth refers to
Ecclesiastes Ch. 7: “The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.”
Do short stories count? I suspect that will open the door for a lot more entries.
Mimsy Were the Borogoves by Lewis Padgett (Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore) taken from the obvious source.
Leif Enger’s Peace Like a River, a popular book club title some years back:
I wish you would pay attention to my commands.
If you did, peace would flow over you like a river. Isaiah 48:14
Frederick Forsyth’s Dogs of War, from a well-known source:
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, as spoken by Marc Antony: "Cry havoc! And let slip the dogs of war.
Also where the title of George R. Stewart’s post-apocalyptic novel Earth Abides got its title.