Style and Influence
His most famous poem The Hound of Heaven, describes the pursuit of the human soul by God. This poem is 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. A phrase in his The Kingdom of God is the source of the title of Han Suyin's novel and the movie Love is a Many-Splendored Thing. In addition, Thompson wrote the most famous cricket poem, the nostalgic At Lord's. He also wrote Sister Songs (1895), New Poems (1897), and a posthumously published essay, "Shelley" (1909). He wrote a treatise On Health and Holiness, dealing with the ascetic life, which was published in 1905.
G. K. Chesterton said shortly after his death that "with Francis Thompson we lost the greatest poetic energy since Browning." His grave is in St.Mary's Roman Catholic Cemetery in London. Among Thompson's devotees was the young J.R.R. Tolkien, who purchased a volume of Thompson's works in 1913-1914, and later said that it was an important influence on his own writing. The American novelist Madeleine L'Engle used a line from the poem "The Mistress of Vision" as the title of her last Vicki Austin novel, Troubling a Star.
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Famous quotes containing the words style and, style and/or influence:
“I never knew a writer yet who took the smallest pains with his style and was at the same time readable.”
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“The style of an author should be the image of his mind, but the choice and command of language is the fruit of exercise.”
—Edward Gibbon (1737–1794)
“The improvements of ages have had but little influence on the essential laws of man’s existence: as our skeletons, probably, are not to be distinguished from those of our ancestors.”
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