‘I read him much’: Agatha Christie and Poetry

Abstract

This essay explores the pervasive and underexamined role of poetry in Agatha Christie's crime fiction, life writing, and creative practice. While Christie is rarely discussed as a poet or as a writer shaped by poetic traditions, her work is saturated with verse: from Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Eliot, and Carroll to her own neglected poetry collections, The Road of Dreams (1925) and Poems (1973). Focusing on titles, epigraphs, and moments of citation in novels such as Sad Cypress, Sparkling Cyanide, and The Hollow, the article argues that poetic allusion in Christie is neither decorative nor merely a marker of shared cultural literacy. Rather, poetry operates as a structural and tonal device through which Christie explores fatalism, remembrance, concealment, and the irreversibility of action – central concerns of crime fiction itself. Hercule Poirot's poetic citations, for instance, reveal detection as an interpretive practice that borders on the poetic, arranging fragments until meaning emerges. The article also reassesses Christie's own poetry, situating it within nineteenth-century lyric and ballad traditions, and demonstrating how its themes reverberate through her prose. In doing so, it offers the first sustained account in decades of Christie's poetry and its significance for understanding her crime writing.