It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes poems are recited in films, to good effect. Most well-known example is probably the Auden poem featured in “3 Weddings and a Funeral”. I also like the moment in the movie “In Her Shoes” when Cameron Diaz recites Cummings’ lovely poem “I Carry Your Heart.”
Any others?
In Gunga Din, when an actor playing Rudyard Kipling gives a eulogy by reciting the poem he just wrote about the regimental water-carrier.
The poem Invictus read by Morgan Freeman in the movie of the same name.
The line “nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands” from an e.e. cummings poem was featured in Hannah and Her Sisters. Also, Rudyard Kipling’s My Boy Jack was read at the end of the movie (or was it a Masterpiece Theater?) of the same name.
I hated that scene, I truly did. I guess because poetry just isn’t so popular these days, most folks don’t know how to read it anymore. Morgan Freeman just murders the prosody of the poem.
The film Breaker Morant has them repeating some of the poems Morant actually wrote.
For all the vitriol against “Disneyfication”, the Disnrey version of Alice in Wonderland actually quotes more of Lewis Carroll’s parody poems than any other film version.
well he’s back writes:
> Most well-known example is probably the Auden poem featured in “3 Weddings
> and a Funeral”.
Man, you’ve really got to complain to your local movie theater about their playing edited versions of films.