Who said, “A poem should not mean/But be”?

Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (1920) was the book about the Holy Grail quest that T. S. Eliot drew upon in his poem, The Waste Land.

Ohio-born writer Earl Derr Biggers invented the portly Honolulu detective Charlie Chan. The first book about Chan was The House Without a Key (1925).

The golliwog, a type of doll known as “the blackest gnome,” was invented by Florence K. Upton in The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a “Golliwog” (1895). More golliwog tales followed until 1909.

Popularized in the 1960s by Roland Barthes and others, narratology is the study of narrative, linguistic or otherwise: myths, legends, novels, comic strips, stained-glass windows, psychological case studies. It employs methods drawn from structuralism, the study of the relations and functions of the internal elements of cultural phenomena.

Clifford Odets wrote a play called Paradise Lost that was not based on Milton’s poem, in 1935. The play was about the fall of a middle-class family.

Edgar Allan Poe’s epitaph was “Quoth the Raven nevermore,” from his poem “The Raven” (1845).