Invictus aside, poetry in cinema is embarrassing

I'm wary of poetry in cinema, the same way I'm wary of it in general. Characters quoting verse at one another make my toes curl
'I am master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul' ... Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela in a still from the film Invictus (2009). Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar

Invictus, Clint Eastwood's new film, is named after a poem by William Ernest Henley, who wrote it in 1875 to lift up his ­spirits after having a leg ­amputated. Nelson Mandela (played by Morgan Freeman) quotes the lines, "I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul" as a source of uplift and inspiration, and it's just a shame for everyone concerned that the  same poem was chosen as a ­pre-execution statement by Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber.

Henley's not the only Victorian poet whose work has provided memorable but, to the uninitiated, slightly baffling titles. Even if you've never heard of ­Ernest Dowson, you'll be familiar with at least two of his phrases: Gone with the Wind and Days of Wine and Roses. Dipping even further back into literary history, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is borrowed from Alexander Pope's poem about Eloisa wishing she could forget Abelard. The enduring popularity of Rudyard Kipling's If–, voted Britain's Favourite Poem in a 1995 BBC opinion poll, must be at least partly owed to its having been adopted, with the dash ­replaced by an ellipsis, as a title for ­Lindsay Anderson's subversive school fantasy, though one imagines Anderson was being ironic; he reportedly loathed the poem and all it stood for.

I'm wary of poetry in the cinema, the same way I'm wary of poetry in general; I find it faintly embarrassing. I pretend to like it so no one will think me a Philistine, but in reality the only volume of poetry I ever read from cover to cover was Les Fleurs du Mal, and then only because it had vampires in it. When I hear poetry in films, I automatically assume the screenwriter is co-opting someone else's words because they're too lazy to come up with their own. Easier for Richard Curtis to have John Hannah deliver WH Auden's Funeral Blues in Four Weddings and a Funeral than to write his own ­eulogy to a dead companion.

Meanwhile, characters quoting verse at one another is a sure way of making my toes curl; there's a particularly ­excruciating example in the duff thriller Half Moon Street, when Michael Caine says, "Let us go now, you and I," and Sigourney Weaver (playing an academic who moonlights as a call-girl) replies, "When the evening is spread out against the sky." Soulmates, you see.

You'd be entitled to ask for your money back if you didn't hear a bit of poetry ­in poet-pics such as Bright Star or the ­forth­coming Howl (and if ­Allen Ginsberg looked anything like James Franco, who plays him, I'll eat my Pocket Poets ­edition, which I only bought because it featured as a gag in the werewolf movie The Howling). And you expect to hear poetry in a film called Dead Poets Society, which means Walt Whitman's O Captain! My Captain! (written after Abraham ­Lincoln's assassination) will forever be ­associated with standing on desks.

Nor are you surprised to come across it in the work of an inveterate intellectual name-dropper such as Woody Allen, whose Another Woman features a scene, poignant or ­pretentious depending on your point of view, in which Gena Rowlands finds a line in a volume of Rainer Maria Rilke ("You must change your life now") stained by her dead mother's tears, the emo equivalent of a highlighter pen.

I'm not totally anti-poem. I like the way Christina Rossetti's Remember keeps cropping up in Kiss Me Deadly, where its context, sandwiched between torture with a pair of pliers and the ­Manhattan Project, makes it haunting rather than twee. Lines from John Donne's first Holy Sonnet ("I run to death, and death meets me as fast") add the finishing touch of suicidal gloom to the downbeat B-movie thriller The ­Seventh Victim, while ­Rodney ­Dangerfield's rendition of Dylan ­Thomas's Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night is all the more moving for its popping up in the rumbustious comedy Back to School.

Otherwise, I feel safer sticking with John Lillison, England's greatest one-armed poet, whose Pointy Birds is quoted in The Man With Two Brains: "O pointy birds, O pointy pointy, Anoint my head, Anointy-nointy."