than·a·top·sis

(thăn′ə-tŏp′sĭs)

A meditation upon death.

[Greek thanatos, death + -opsis.]

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

thanatopsis

(ˌθænəˈtɒpsɪs)

(Literary & Literary Critical Terms) a meditation on death, as in a poem

[C19: from Greek thanatos death + opsis a view]

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014

thanatopsis

a survey of or meditation upon death.

See also: Death, Meditation

ThesaurusAntonymsRelated WordsSynonymsLegend:

Noun

thanatopsis - an essay expressing a view on the subject of death

essay - an analytic or interpretive literary composition

Mentioned in

References in classic literature

The pie list swelled; the richer puddings had vanished; the sausage, with his drapery wrapped about him, barely lingered in a pleasant thanatopsis with the buckwheats and the sweet but doomed maple.

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Acuna, my literature teacher, introduced us to Silas Marner, Thanatopsis, and Ichabod Crane.

Thank you Teacher

Molecular thanatopsis: a discourse on the BCL2 family and cell death.

Analysis of Apoptosis in Cultured Human Vitrified Ovarian Tissue in the Presence of Leukemia Inhibitory Factor

Like the preening members of the Thanatopsis Club in Sinclair Lewis's Main Street (1920), the "indomitable huntresses of erudition" (Wharton 1958,16) of the Hillbridge women's study group in Wharton's "Xingu" (1916) are arraigned before the reader with the sole aim of condemning the degradation of culture under the combined pressures of parochialism and commercialism.

"Interested in Big Things, and Happy in Small Ways": Curiosity in Edith Wharton

1) In Gopher Prairie there is Thanatopsis Club (thanatopsis = Greek "vision of death"; a name that was probably suggested by the poem which William Cullen Bryant, aged sixteen, wrote after reading Robert Blair's The Grave and William Cowper's The Task): this is the main cultural force of the city, led by the most eminent ladies, who attend conferences on the English poets.

The rise of the underground: Sinclair Lewis's disenchanted universe

But poignant is American poet William Cullen Bryant's "Thanatopsis" or reflections on death.

'Thanatopsis' on the Mamasapano cornfield

(28.) It was Bryant's "Thanatopsis" that William cited in hs autobiography (24).

Sketching] and Paint[ing] in Ecstasy--William and Marguerite Zorach in Yosemite Valley, Summer 1920

Durand's Landscape--Scene from 'Thanatopsis' (1850) illustrates the melancholic poem of the same title by William Cullen Bryant (1811, 1817).

Gothic castles in the landscape: Sir Walter Scott and the Hudson River School of painting

"Imaginative Thanatopsis: Death and the 19th-century American Subject." DAI 70, No.

Current bibliography