Lambs by Thomas Harris, Clarice Starling reveals to Hannibal Lecter one detail of her father's last days in a hospital: 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 (featuring Buckethead and Travis Dickerson) was named after this poem. The band's first album, Thanatopsis, was also named after this poem. The electronic artist Daedelus 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 Space Ghost Coast to Coast episode "Terminal", a portion of the poem is set to folk music and sung by writer/producer Dave Willis. In 1934, Scott Bradley composed an oratorio, based on Thanatopsis. In the 1942 film Grand Central Murder, the private railway car where the showgirl is murdered is named Thanatopsis. The American author of detective fiction Phoebe Atwood Taylor has her hero Leonidas Witherall recount the first lines in her 1947 book The Iron Clew. The poem is also mentioned in Taylor's 1934 book The Mystery of the Cape Cod Tavern as having been part of an obituary. The seminal conservationist Aldo Leopold quoted several passages from Thanatopsis in his posthumously published essay "Some Fundamentals of Conservation in the Southwest." In August Wilson's 2003 play Gem of the Ocean, Solly offers the final nine lines of the poem ("So live . . . pleasant dreams") as a toast to send off Citizen Barlow to the city of bones. Eli joins Solly in the recitation, offering his own interpretation of the lines: "You die by how you live." The Acacia fraternity adopted the last stanza as their code. Cindy Williams reads from Thanatopsis in Andy Kaufman's ABC TV Special aired in 1979. In the 2020 film Driveways, Jerry Adler quotes the poem as a sudden memory from his childhood; a sign he has dementia. References Further reading Max Cavitch, American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman (University of Minnesota Press, 2007). Includes a chapter on the poem. Connie Willis, Ado (Asimov's Science Fiction, 1988) A short story about political correctness and religious vigilance run amok on campus mentions this poem. Acacia International Fraternity External links (multiple versions) American poems 1811 poems Works originally published in the North American Review