RSS Feed

The 50 Most Quoted Lines of Poetry

What are yours?

This list, from Inky Fool, has been compiled by the number of hits each line receives when it is fed into Google. To my mind that means that it isn’t accurate because there is no way of knowing or calculating the lines from poetry the man in the street uses everyday. I’d be surprised if it wasn’t a line from Shakespeare, given that he coined a remarkably number of the phrases that we use everyday. But as M H Forsyth says in the piece, Google is the best we’ve got!

The Guardian has a comment on it and below, is the breakdown in graphic form. Click each image to enlarge.

One response »

  1. I am amazed to see Alexander Pope at number on and W.E. Henley at number three beating Shakespeare at four. A fascinating survey!

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

%d bloggers like this: