Comments on: Guy Davenport: Learning How to Die http://sanseverything.wordpress.com/2011/07/31/guy-davenport-learning-how-to-die/ If all the world's a stage, where's the damn script? Sat, 18 May 2013 04:22:33 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: Elizabeth http://sanseverything.wordpress.com/2011/07/31/guy-davenport-learning-how-to-die/#comment-5019 Sat, 11 Aug 2012 14:27:43 +0000 http://sanseverything.wordpress.com/?p=3002#comment-5019 Thank you for the perceptive post and the wonderful photograph. Impels me to go pull out Davenport’s book of essays Geography of the Imagination and read once again his comments on the painting “American Gothic.” Thanks for keeping his memory and his work in our minds.

Poor Hopkins had such a generally miserable, misunderstood life that I’ve always wondered if his last words – “I’m so happy” – expressed his deep religious conviction that soon he would be with God in Heaven, relief that he didn’t have to continue living, or euphoria from a dose of morphine. I do wish he could have known how many people would one day hold his poems so close to their hearts. I don’t think that the importance that his work had on English literature once they were finally published would have meant as much to him, but he might have enjoyed seeing the direct (and acknowledged) influence of his work on the poetry of someone such as Seamus Heaney.

And I’ve always wondered if Noah Webster’s last words: “The room is growing crepuscular” was a spontaneous comment by a man with an enormous vocabulary, or something he’d spent some time planning. I

]]> By: Doug Bruns http://sanseverything.wordpress.com/2011/07/31/guy-davenport-learning-how-to-die/#comment-4473 Mon, 24 Oct 2011 18:59:40 +0000 http://sanseverything.wordpress.com/?p=3002#comment-4473 Wonderful post. Thanks. It is refreshing to read your comments on Davenport. He was so wonderful a thinker yet remains, for many, an unknown.

Favorite last words: Thoreau: “Indian, Moose…”

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