Talia started all this by wanting to know what poems people memorize.
Then here I am with a bunch of pieces and don't know where they came from.
I have tried google and jeeves and all but what is a good place to look for fragments or "stuck in minds"?
One starts
"No earth of thine is lost to vulgar mold..._"
I plugged "No earth of thine" into my search engine and got this in one try. It's from verse 88 of the second Canto II of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage." Read it at:
[www.geocities.com]
Last night in my poetry class, we did an exercise. Prof. passed out a list of "first line", most of them being famous. We had to pick a line and start writing a poem from there. It was a great exercise and I got a lot of creativity from it, now I have to figure out how to revise it without stealing someone's line.
Hey, Eliot started Prufrock off with a bit from Dante...........
pam
Erato has an interesting thread on 'tailgating':
[tinyurl.com]
Yes...this proves the exercise is a nudge into creativity, although some of those were a bit tasteless, I did like these:
Shopping List
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread, and Thou-
sand Island Dressing. Pampers. Puppy Chow.
Cosmic, Man
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
requires a substance that's been banned.
jejeje™
Mary, Part 2
Mary had a little lamb
marinated in mint jam.
Thanks marian I will keep trying search engines till I find one that works for me.
Russ, Google is normally pretty good for a first search, so I'm surprised you had difficulty - are you putting phrases into inverted commas? If not, then it'll throw up everything that contains the words you type in (in no particular order).
Typing "no earth of thine" into Google: inverted commas mean the difference between 206,000 irrelevant hits, or 11 rather more relevant ones which, as Marian-NYC says, include Childe Harold.
Also, if you're not sure of the exact wording, you can put in "OR".
So to search for either Mary had a little lamb or Mary had a little sheep, you type in "mary had a little (lamb OR sheep)"
Another rather more comprehensive engine is Copernic, which I use if Google doesn't throw anything up. It's freely available at [www.copernic.com] (but I don't find it as straightforward to use as Google.)
Those are the ones that work best for me.
Thank you for the help Tigermonkey. I use my computer quite some but mostly for writing. I will experiment with searches a little more.
My next try will be
She starts- She moves- She seems to feel
The thrill of life along her keel
Talia wrote that in her class she "had to pick a line and start writing a poem from there. It was a great exercise and I got a lot of creativity from it, now I have to figure out how to revise it without stealing someone's line."
If that's the assignment -- to remove the line that started it all -- then by all means do so.
But I noticed a poem in THE NEW YORKER recently that started with a line from a pre-existing poem, and it was entitled "Poem Beginning with a Line from Keats" (or whoever the poet was--I don't remember).
So that would be another way to avoid "stealing"--by ANNOUNCING where the first line came from.
ahhhh. Great idea! Thanks Marion!
Also, I think that italicizing the line or putting it in quotes would show that you acknowledge that it isn't yours. (even if you don't formally cite it)
This is reminding me of 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer'
pam
Thanks again Marian. I might try that. Haven't really written in years. But I do know some one liners!