Literary Allusion Title/Quotes

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


...condemn the fashionable device of entitling a collection of essays or a volume of poetry -- or a long poem, alas -- with a phrase lifted from a more or less celebrated poetical work of the past. Such titles possess a specious glamor acceptable maybe in the names of vintage wines and plump courtesans but only degrading in regard to the talent that substitutes the easy allusiveness of literacy for original fancy and shifts onto a bust's shoulders the responsibility for ornateness since anyone can flip through a Midsummer-Night's Dream or Romeo and Juliet, or, perhaps, the Sonnets and take his pick.