Title: Famous Last Words | Academy of American Poets
Headings: Famous Last Words
Famous Last Words
Content: As Joyce is known as one of the most challenging writers in the English language, particularly for his associative, stream-of-consciousness novels Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, it’s perhaps fitting then that his alleged last words address a failure of comprehension: “ Does nobody understand?” Joyce died on January 13, 1941, in Zurich of a perforated duodenal ulcer, at the age of fifty-nine. John Keats: “ I can feel the daisies growing over me.” In 1818, John Keats returned home from a tour of Northern England and Scotland to care for his brother, who had contracted tuberculosis. Unfortunately, Keats’s brother died in December of that year and by that time Keats himself had contracted the disease and knew that his death was imminent. Following his doctor’s orders to seek a warm climate for the winter, Keats traveled to Rome with his friend, the painter Joseph Severn. Keats recovered briefly for Christmas but on January 10, 1819, his health took a final turn for the worst and Keats was unable to leave his bedroom. Just before Keats’s death, Severn asked the poet how he was doing, to which Keats quietly replied, “Better, my friend.