Thomas Gray's Elegy shows what some of these books did to a poem: its lines were recited, set to music, accused of plagiarism, misquoted, and chopped into specimens of meter. A 1906 grammar book even treated the poem as a scrapyard of adjectives! ✂️

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Finding these lines is hard: quoted verse often washes ashore without title or author, misremembered or garbled by OCR. So we used text-reuse detection to match the Princeton Prosody Archive (~2M pages of manuals on prosody, elocution, grammar, rhetoric) against ~250K English-language poems.

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After weeding out false matches: we found ~37K poems to be quoted in 3,962 works (mostly books and articles) from 1694 to 1920. What we see is a superstar economy 🌟 42% of poems are quoted in just one work, while the big guns return again and again: Paradise Lost in 1,326 works, Hamlet in 1,287.

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Which poems gained ground in these books, and which lost it? A few cherry-picked examples 👇 Each line follows one poem: above the dashed line it was quoted more than its own average, below it less.

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Ovid's Metamorphoses (mostly in Dryden's translation), slides steadily out of use. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales keeps climbing. Othello gains through the 1700s, then holds its place. Erasmus Darwin's Botanic Garden booms in the early 1800s, then fades again.

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