William Butler Yeats’ epitaph that he wrote for himself was:
“Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!”
The epitaph appears on Yeats’s tombstone in Drum-cliff churchyard under a mountain called Ben Bulben in County Sligo, Ireland, just as Yeats wrote in his poem “Under Ben Bulben” (1939).
In Charles Perrault’s original version (1697), the wolf devours Little Red Riding Hood, the “prettiest girl that ever was seen.” In the Brothers Grimm version (1812), called “Little Red Cap,” a hunter cuts open the wolf with a pair of scissors and frees the girl and her grandmother.
The rest of the nursery rhyme from which Ken Kesey took the title for his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is: Wire, briar, limber, lock, Three geese in a flock, One flew East, one flew West, One flew over the cuckoo’s nest.
The annual prize for poetry, the Bollingen Prize, was first awarded in 1949 to Ezra Pound for his Pisan Cantos (1948).
Fyodor Dostoyevsky translated Eugenie Grandet (1833) into Russian. Dostoyevsky’s 1844 translation was his first publication.
The first movie mentioned by name in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer is Stagecoach (1939), directed by John Ford.
The French author of Consuelo (1842), George Sand was born Amandine Lucie Aurore Dupin.