Influence
- Thompson's poem was the inspiration for a series of 23 paintings by the American painter R. H. Ives Gammell (1893–1981). Titled, A Pictorial Sequence Painted by R. H. Ives Gammell Based on The Hound of Heaven, it is considered Gammell's magnum opus. Gammell began making plans to execute the pictorial sequence during World War II and completed the series in 1956. For his paintings, Gammell used symbols drawn from C. G. Jung, primitive and medieval cultures, and biblical and mythological sources, to give visual form to Thompson's poem. The Pictorial Sequence is currently housed at the Maryhill Museum of Art, Goldendale, Washington, USA.
- Thompson's poem is also the source of the phrase, "with all deliberate speed," used by the Supreme Court in Brown II, the remedy phase of the famous decision on school desegregation.
- The Christian alternative rock band Daniel Amos wrote a song titled Hound of Heaven on their 1978 album Horrendous Disc that is based on the Thompson poem.
- "The Hound of Heaven" is the fifth chapter in Robert L. Short's 1965 book The Gospel According to Peanuts where he describes Snoopy as a "little Christ" carrying out "Christ's ambivalent work of humbling the exalted and exalting the humble."
- "The Hound of Heaven" was mentioned in the suicide note of George R. Price, a geneticist who pioneered the evolutionary theory of altruism and suicide (among other things), before becoming a committed Christian and giving away all his possessions to the poor.
- Paramhansa Yogananda, the Indian spiritual master, included "The Hound of Heaven" in one of his two albums, "Songs of My Heart".
- In A. J. Cronin's novel, A Pocketful of Rye, the protagonist Carroll reads the poem as a young man, forgets it, and suffers from a recurring nightmare that finally leads to his conversion.
- A short passage from the poem appears in chapter four of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca.
- Lines from the poem are recited between the discussion during the last scene in "The last enemy", which is 2nd episode of 3rd season of Inspector Morse
Read more about this topic: The Hound Of Heaven
Famous quotes containing the word influence:
“If morality had naturally no influence on human passions and actions, it were in vain to take such pains to inculcate it; and nothing would be more fruitless than that multitude of rules and precepts with which all moralists abound.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
“The purifying, healing influence of literature, the dissipating of passions by knowledge and the written word, literature as the path to understanding, forgiveness and love, the redeeming might of the word, the literary spirit as the noblest manifestation of the spirit of man, the writer as perfected type, as saint.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)