Appearances in Popular Culture
In The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris, Clarice Starling reveals to Hannibal Lecter one detail of her father's last days in hospital as an elderly neighbour reading to him the last lines of "Thanatopsis." In Sinclair Lewis' novel Main Street, the women's study club of Gopher Prairie is the Thanatopsis club.
The experimental band Thanatopsis was named after this poem. The band's first album, Thanatopsis, was also named after this poem. The electronic artist Daedalus named the last song on the album Exquisite Corpse after the poem.
The Avant Garde film-maker Ed Emshwiller's 1962 short film Thanatopsis was inspired by the poem. In the episode "Terminal" of Space Ghost Coast to Coast, a portion of the poem is set to sappy folk music and sung by Dave Willis.
In the 1942 film Grand Central Murder, the private railway car where the showgirl is murdered is named Thanatopsis.
In T.C. Boyle's 1990 novel, East is East, the writer's colony, on the fictitious Georgia sea island of Tupelo (near Darien) is called Thanatopsis House. Each of the artists in the colony have their own private studio cabin to work in during the day. Each studio cabin is named after a famous suicide (example: Hart Crane).
ACACIA International Fraternity adopted the stanza as their poem.
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Famous quotes containing the words appearances, popular and/or culture:
“Truth has scarce done so much good in the world as the false appearances of it have done hurt.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)
“The new sound-sphere is global. It ripples at great speed across languages, ideologies, frontiers and races.... The economics of this musical esperanto is staggering. Rock and pop breed concentric worlds of fashion, setting and life-style. Popular music has brought with it sociologies of private and public manner, of group solidarity. The politics of Eden come loud.”
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“Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing—he will perceive its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produces him.”
—Lionel Trilling (1905–1975)