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Poetic place names?


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Developers of suburban neighborhoods, wanting to sell property for more than it's really worth, come up with "poetic" place names; e.g., Whispering Hills, Royal Oaks, Avondale, Mystic Glen, Jasmine Court, Morning Heights, Yorkshire Orchard, Hummingbird Acres, Sylvan Park. Usually these names carry connotations of the quiet countryside, aristocratic (perhaps British) superiority, and/or natural beauty.

But when I write poetry, I find myself returning to the place names near where I grew up in the backwoods of Tennessee. Now these really did represent a quiet countryside, natural beauty, and--yes, nobility too, in a good old Scotch-Irish way; e.g., Ebenezer, Delina, Grab All, Gnat Grove, Ostella, New Hope, Cherry Corner, Spring Place, Yell, Diana, Cornersville, Chesternut Ridge, Liberty Valley, Riggs Crossroad, Land o' Goshen (ok, I admit, I made up the last one, but a family friend wanted to name his farm that). Most of these no longer exist, or at least they are no longer called by a name. But they were the poetry we country folk lived among.

All humankind are poets by nature. You can tell by the names we assign the places where we live our lives, drive our vehicles, do our jobs, rear our children. My father called his farm Seven Springs (though I could never figure out where the seventh one was). My wife and I have named our houses beginning with the Pink Palace (the one-bedroom duplex where we spent our first months of marriage) and Dingy Dungeon (married student housing at our university).

But probably what you are asking for are genuine poetic names; that is, memorable names used in literature we love. OK, here are my top seven, plus five from children's literature:

the Forest of Arden (Shakespeare's As You Like It)

Wuthering Heights

Camelot (The Once and Future King, and of course the musical based on that book)

Sherwood Forest (Robin Hood)

Wessex (the fiction of Thomas Hardy)

Yoknapatawpha County (the fiction of William Faulkner

Xanadu (Coleridge's poem and Orson Welles' Citizen Kane)

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Middle Earth (J. R. R. Tolkien)

Narnia (C. S. Lewis)

Prydain (Lloyd Alexander)

Neverland (J. M. Barrie)

Sunset Towers (Westing Game by Ellen Raskin)

Mulberry Street (Dr. Seuss, who also invented Whoville for the Grinch to steal Christmas from)

Rootabaga country (Carl Sandburg)