12 Book Titles That Came From Poems

HuffPost -  03/ 8/2012

Sometimes a book title is a no-brainer. Herzog." "Mating." "Cujo." But sometimes writers get directly inspired by other works, and that seed of a title worms its way in from a fleeting line the writer had once glanced on a page. Take, for example, John O’Hara becoming dead set on titling his masterwork "Appointment in Samarra" by that name because of an Arabian tale he read about in Sheepey by W. Somerset Maugham. Within that huge group of books whose titles reference other works, there are a number that borrow a line of poetry for their title. Here are some of our favorites.

"The Lovely Bones" by Alice Sebold

Comes from "I Knew a Woman" by Theodore Roethke

I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,

When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;

Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:

The shapes a bright container can contain!

The rest at HuffPost.