- W. E. B. Du Bois quotes from the eleventh stanza of part IV of the poem at the end of chapter 17 of Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (originally published 1935; but see 1992 Atheneum edition, p. 709 at https://archive.org/details/blackreconstruct00webu/page/708/):
For he has a pall, this wretched man, Such as few men can claim; Deep down below a prison-yard, Naked, for greater shame, He lies, with fetters on each foot, Wrapt in a sheet of flame!
- During the climax of D. W. Griffith's Intolerance, as The Boy is being led toward the gallows, one of the title-cards quotes the following excerpt:
So with curious eyes and sick surmise We watched him day by day, And wondered if each one of us Would end the self-same way, For none can tell to what red Hell His sightless soul may stray.
- In a 1962 episode of The Virginian titled "The Brazen Bell", a timid schoolteacher (George C. Scott) recites The Ballad of Reading Gaol to distract a convicted wife-killer who is holding him and a group of schoolchildren hostage (the series was set in approximately the same year as the first publication of the poem).
- In Vladimir Mayakovsky's long poem About This (Russian: Про это), there is a section titled "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" ("Баллада Редингской тюрьмы").
- In A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, while discussing the experimental aversion therapy administered to the narrator Alex, Dr. Branom says, "Each man kills the thing he loves, as the poet-prisoner said".
- The Ballad of Reading Gaol is also referenced and quoted in Eugene O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness!, and referenced in Act IV of Long Day's Journey into Night.
- The line "Each man kills the thing he loves" appears in two films concerned with ideas of criminality: Mad Love and Querelle.
- Robert Mitchum misquotes the poem to Janet Leigh in the 1949 film Holiday Affair – "There's a poem that runs roughly, 'Each man kicks the thing he loves.'"
- The Ballad of Reading Gaol is quoted at the end of chapter 16 of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, attributing it to "a poet, to whom the world had dealt its justice".
- An excerpt of the poem is quoted in the 2018 film The Happy Prince.
