Borrowed-Line Poetry Prompts
Quick answer: Borrowed-line poetry prompts: use the glosa, golden shovel and cento traditions to build new poems from found lines, with clear notes on credit and copyright.
Every poet writes in a borrowed house. The glosa, a Renaissance Spanish form, opens with four lines from another poet and unpacks one per stanza. The cento is stitched entirely from other people's lines, a form the Romans already found old. More recently, Terrance Hayes invented the golden shovel, hiding a Gwendolyn Brooks line down the right-hand margin of his own poem, one borrowed word ending each line. Borrowing, done in the open, is a conversation, not a theft.
The craft insight: a borrowed line is a tuning fork. It sets a pitch your own lines must live up to, and the gap between your voice and the borrowed one is where the poem happens. One rule before you start: borrow from the public domain or keep borrowings to a few words, and always name your source.
The Prompts
For safety and freedom, these prompts lean on public domain poets, Dickinson, Keats, Rossetti, Whitman, and on non-poetic sources nobody owns, like overheard speech and your own old notebooks.
- Take Emily Dickinson's line 'Hope is the thing with feathers' and write a golden shovel: each word of her line, in order, ends one line of your poem about a hospital vending machine at midnight.
- Open a public domain poem at random, steal its final line, and use it as your first line. Write away from the original's subject as fast as possible.
- Build a cento of exactly ten lines from ten different pre-1928 poets, on a subject none of them wrote about: airport security, or a group chat going quiet.
- Borrow the most boring sentence from a letter or email you received this year. Set it as a refrain that returns three times, gathering menace with each return.
- Write a glosa on four lines of Christina Rossetti: quote the quatrain up front, then four ten-line stanzas, each ending on the next of her lines.
- Take a line from your own earliest surviving poem, however bad, and let your present self answer it, one stanza of then, one of now, alternating.
- Steal a line of overheard speech this week, verbatim, and build a poem where it appears exactly in the middle, spoken by someone the eavesdropper never sees.
- Borrow the first line of Keats's 'To Autumn', 'Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness', and contradict it for twenty lines from inside a heatwave that will not break.
- Lift one line from a hymn, lullaby or playground rhyme everyone in your family knows, and place it in a poem about the person who sang it, without naming them.
- Write a poem whose every line begins with the same three words borrowed from a road sign, form, or public notice: 'In the event', or 'Keep this door'.
- Take Whitman's 'I contain multitudes' as a title only, and write the inventory of one kitchen drawer as proof.
- Borrow a line from a poem in translation, then write the customs declaration it would need to cross into your language: what was lost, what was smuggled, what duty was paid.
- Find the sentence you have underlined most confidently in any book you own. Write the poem you were hoping it would end, and end with it.
- Exchange single lines with another poet, sight unseen, and each write a sonnet whose volta lands exactly on the traded line.
How to Use These
Handle the borrowed line like a guest, not a hostage. Read its whole source poem first, then set the book face down and draft from memory's version of the line, letting your mishearings in; you can restore exactness later. Give yourself half an hour per prompt and write past the borrowed material quickly, because the commonest failure of these poems is orbiting the quotation in admiration instead of doing new work beside it. Your lines should risk being quoted back.
Credit is part of the form, never an apology for it. A glosa names its source in an epigraph; a golden shovel notes the donor line and poet; a cento lists every source at the foot. In revision, test the poem with the borrowed line temporarily removed: if the poem collapses, you have built decoration around a relic, so strengthen your own beams. Contest submissions need the same care, so include the attribution line, keep quotations within public domain or fragment length, and make sure the poem's best line is yours. It should win the comparison it invites.
What poets can take from this
- Borrow from the public domain (pre-1928) when quoting whole lines; for newer work keep to four words or fewer.
- Always name the source poet, even in a private notebook, so future you is never in doubt.
- Choose donor lines with strong verbs; a borrowed image fades, a borrowed action keeps working.
- Write beyond the quotation fast, then return; reverence in a first draft is a handbrake.
- Test the finished poem without its borrowed line; it should limp, not die.
Try it yourself
Take the four last words your grandmother, teacher or oldest friend is remembered for saying, treat them as a donor line, and write a golden shovel where each word closes a stanza rather than a line, so the poem walks slowly toward the final borrowed word.
Questions
Is it plagiarism to use another poet's line in my poem?
Not when the borrowing is declared and the form is recognised: glosas, centos and golden shovels all announce their sources. It becomes plagiarism when you present borrowed words as your own, so attribution is not optional, it is the form's licence.
Which poets are safe to quote from?
Work published before 1928 is in the public domain, so Dickinson, Keats, Whitman, Rossetti and their contemporaries are safe to quote at line length. For living or recent poets, describe rather than quote, or keep any borrowed fragment to a few words with credit.
Can I submit borrowed-line poems to competitions?
Usually yes, if you include the attribution and the bulk of the poem is your own writing. Check each contest's originality rules first; most, including Writory's, accept declared forms like the golden shovel but reject undeclared borrowing.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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