ok, so there's:
Wuthering Heights from 'Wuthering Heights'
The Sensual World from 'Ulysses'
Cloudbursting from 'A Book of Dreams'
Infant Kiss from 'The Turn of the Screw'
...anything else???
― coelcanth, Thursday, 13 February 2003 05:06 (twenty-three years ago)
Isn't Lord of the Reedy River from somewhere?
And The Ninth Wave drew heavily on Tennyson.
...I think she's basing the new one on War and Peace, considering the time it's taking her!!!!!!!
― russ t, Thursday, 13 February 2003 16:28 (twenty-three years ago)
"all of them" is not so far off! According to "Siblproject"
(siblproject.org) Kate's done musical book reports on these too :
1) the Shining ("Get Out Of My House")
2) The Bible ("Song of Solomon")
oh, and don't forget "Red Shoes" -- that's a Hans Christian Andersen story. And there are bits of Tennyson's poems sampled in Hounds of Love, if I'm remembering correctly. Or was it samples of Yeats' poems? Actually, I think it was both. One wrote the "we are of water..." bit and the other wrote the bit about "each wave mightier than the last". I took a poetry class a while back, and whenever we read a new poem from the Romantic Era, I kept thinking "Haven't I heard that somewhere before?" Then I'd go home and play some Kate Bush albums and there it would be!
Spotting literature references in Kate Bush songs is like spotting geographical locations in Japan/David Sylvian songs. You don't realize how many there are until you actually start counting them (Suburban Berlin, Life In Tokyo, Visions of China, European Son, Cantonese Boy, Rhodesia, ... oh lordy, don't get me started! That's a while new thread -- if not a drinking game in the making).
The most musically quoted poet seems to be William Blake ("William Blake?" "William Blake!" etc -- a la Bull Durham). Everyone from Blur ("Magpie") to Verve ("History") has covered him.
Oh, and hey, Goth fans : if you know the tune to "Yellow Rose of Texas", you can sing nearly any Emily Dickenson poem along to it. May I recommend "Because I Could Not Stop For Death" or "I Heard A Fly".
(a girl's gotta do something with her poetry degree ...)
― stripey, Thursday, 13 February 2003 16:30 (twenty-three years ago)