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Sep 10, 2019 · So, without more ado, here’s our pick of ten of the very best poems about movies, cinema, and film. Many of the following poems (though not all) are included in Faber Book of Movie Verse , a wonderful anthology of classic poems about movies and Hollywood which we picked up for £1 in a local charity shop.
- "Ave Maria" // Frank O'Hara
- “Big Sue and Now, Voyager” // Carol Ann Duffy
- “Late Movies with Skyler” // Michael Ondaatje
- “The Prisoner of Zenda” // Richard Wilbur
- "Anna May Wong on Silent Films" // Sally Wen Mao
- “Working For Dr. No” // Valery Nash
- "The James Bond Movie" // May Swenson
- “Werewolf Movies” // Margaret Atwood
- "Who Makes Love to Us After We Die" // Diana Marie Delgado
- "The Movies" // Billy Collins
“Mothers of America,” O’Hara pleads, “let your kids go to the movies!” O’Hara frequently referenced films and actors in his poems, though none were as direct about how movies teach us about life as this 1964 classic. What happens, asks O’Hara, if you don’t let the kids go? They will “grow old and blind in front of a TV set / seeing / movies you wou...
Duffy paints a masterful portrait of a woman named Sue who spends each night eating Mars bars and forgetting the day’s sorrows by watching a 1942 Bette Davis film (with an iconic ending) that takes its title from a Walt Whitman poem. “This is where she lives, the wrong side of the glass / in black-and-white,” Duffy writes.
The narrator of this poem watches old movies each night, too. But for him it’s a chance to bond, fleetingly, with the enigmatic Skyler over the 1952 film The Prisoner of Zenda. Other Ondaatje poems have been inspired by movies, he’s written films and a book about film editing, and one of his novels, The English Patient, was adapted into the 1997 Os...
Zenda’s heart-wrenching ending also inspired this bit of light versefrom the witty Wilbur. Princess Flavia must reject the kind Rudolf (played by Stewart Granger) in order to fulfill her duties and marry his lookalike, the irascible King, who “Far from being a stranger, / Is also Stewart Granger.”
Another poem inspired by a silver-screen legend is Mao’s moving tribute to the film star Anna May Wong. Though she achieved success in a nearly all-white industry and even started her own production company, Wong was often typecast as a dangerous femme fatale. “To be first lady on the celluloid / screen—I had to marry / my own cinematic death,” Mao...
Movie poems are frequently opportunities to explore larger moral questions, like why a talented scientist such as Dr. No’s Professor Dent would work for a villain. “Perhaps it was the beautiful efficiency / of the Doctor’s organization / or the attraction of strict discipline, / the little luxuries that those on the payroll let show,” Nash muses.
A different Bond film prompted Swenson to consider a different moral problem: the impossible (and uninteresting) beauty standards that some films promote. “They’re nose-perfect replicas of each other,” she writesof the Bond Girls.
Before she dreamed up the dystopian patriarchy of The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood used poetry—and her wry humor—to ponder why some men might be drawn to violent genre films. “Some last escape / from having to be lawyers?” she asks.
Delgado cites not one but two movies (The Wizard of Oz and Bram Stoker’s Dracula) in this tour-de-force meditation on film, relationships, power, and art. “The best movies begin with an / encounter and end with someone setting someone free,” she writes.
Collins, the hopeless optimist, reminds readers that watching a movie can itself be a poetic activity. He writes that he would like to enjoy a Western“lying down / with the bed hitched up to the television … so the movie could pull me along / the crooked, dusty road of its adventures.”
- Reporter
- "My mama always said, 'Life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get.'" - Forrest Gump from Forrest Gump (1994) There is no movie quote about life that's more profound, or more famous, than this one from Forrest Gump.
- "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”— Ferris Bueller from Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986) Most teen comedies are comprised of mindless fun, raging hormones, and adolescent jokes.
- “Each man’s life touches so many other lives. When he isn’t around he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t he?” – Clarence the Angel from It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
- "Every man dies. Not every man really lives." - William Wallace from Braveheart (1995) Despite some inaccuracies, Mel Gibson's Braveheart is one of the greatest historical dramas ever made.
- Reedsy
- "Risk", by Anaïs Nin. And then the day came, when the risk. to remain tight. in a bud. was more painful. than the risk. it took. to blossom. A single sentence broken up into 8 small lines, Anaïs Nin’s “Risk” uses a flower as a metaphor, to remind us that there will come a day when the pain of complacency will exceed the pain of actually daring to make a change.
- "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening", by Robert Frost. The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep,
- “Hope is the thing with feathers", by Emily Dickinson. I’ve heard it in the chillest land - And on the strangest Sea - Yet - never - in Extremity, It asked a crumb - of me.
- "The Peace of Wild Things", by Wendell Berry. I come into the peace of wild things. who do not tax their lives with forethought. of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
John Keats wrote many a memorable and arresting opening line in his short life, but his opening to his great poem ‘To Autumn’, one of his finest odes, is perhaps his most resonant of all. Images of abundance abound in the first stanza of ‘To Autumn’: ripeness, swell, plump, budding.
Whether poetry is a ‘criticism’ of life, poems about life itself – about the business of living, about what it means to live a full life, and about what ‘lived experience’ might be – abound. Here are ten of the greatest poems about life and living.
Sep 11, 2023 · The most powerful, beautiful and heart-wrenching literary quotes that we hope you'll want to use and refer to or just contemplatively stare at again and again. We've included words spun from the minds of some of the best authors of all time, including Toni Morrison, Oscar Wilde and Stephen King.
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