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.
The Spring of the Tiger, by Victoria Holt: From “Don Juan”, by Lord Byron
Agatha was fond of using literary references, and nursery rhymes, as titles.
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Evil Under the Sun
“There is an evil that I have seen under the sun, and it lies heavy upon humankind.”
Ecclesiastes 6:1,
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“Ten little XXXXXX” (And various other titles)
From a nursery rhyme
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Sad Cypress
Come away, come away, death,
And in sad cypress let me be laid;
Twelfth Night, Shakespeare
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One Two Buckle my Shoe
From a nursery rhyme
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Five Little Pigs
Nursery Rhyme
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The Moving Finger
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on:
Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám:
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Absent in the Spring
“From you have I been absent in the spring,…”
William Shakespeare’s sonnet 98:
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Taken at the Flood
“There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood leads on to fortune …”.
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar
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Crooked House
Nursery Rhyme
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Endless Night
Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.
William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence:
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By the Pricking of My Thumbs
By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes.
William Shakespeare’s Macbeth,
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Postern Of Fate
Postern of Fate, the Desert Gate, Disaster’s Cavern, Fort of Fear,
The Portal of Baghdad am I, and Doorway of Diarbekir.
“Gates of Damascus” by James Elroy Flecker
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Three Blind Mice
Nursery Rhyme
adapted as:
The Mousetrap
Name of the play within a play in Hamlet.
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I may have missed a few.
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch gave this advice to writers about a century ago. (Attributed to a million others since.)
If you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: ‘Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.
Naturally, mystery writers have jumped all over this for titles. I easily found more than a dozen books on the first two pages on Amazon titled Murder Your Darlings, Kill Your Darlings, Kill All Your Darlings, and suchlike. In fact, the first time I encountered the phrase was Max Allen Collins’ 1984 Kill Your Darlings, set at the Bouchercon mystery convention.
Nero Wolfe titles
Some Buried Caesar
from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Fitzgerald translation
I sometimes think that never blows so red
The Rose as where some buried Caesar bled
Too Many Cooks
– saying, “Too many cooks spoil the broth”
Over my Dead Body
– saying
Where There’s a Will
– saying “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”
And be a Villain
From Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5
“That one may smile, and smile,
And be a villain”
Might as Well be Dead
Saying
And Four to Go
Children’s game rhyme
“One for the money
Two for the show
Three to get ready
And four to go”
Renamed as “More Deaths Than One” in the UK edition.
I suspect, although I’ve never been able to confirm it, that this is an allusion to Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad Of Reading Gaol:
And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats,
None knew so well as I:
For he who lives more lives than one
More deaths than one must die.
And more specifically,
This hymn, written after a pretty depressing shipwreck:
When peace like a river attendeth my way
When sorrows like sea billows roll
Whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to say
It is well, it is well, with my soul
That Ecclesiastes guy must have been a lot of fun at parties.