My thesis is about literary references, paraphrases and quotes in contemporary popular music lyrics. The basis of collecting infromation was a questionnaire I made on this topic, and my personal knowledge about it as well. In the first chapter, I have made a historical overview of lyric poetry, the literary genre that is closest to music. In the second one, I made an analysis of rock and metal songs' literary references. In the third one, my research contained pop songs in movie adaptations' soundtracks. In the conclusion I drew a conclusion, which proved that literature and popular music still have a strong connection with each other in the twenty-first century.