The Complete
Poetical Works
of
Oliver Wendell
Holmes
Few American authors have made themselves members of so many families as the Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. Oliver Wendell Holmes enraged the hidebound conservatives of his day and delighted everyone else.
For years the public anxiously awaited the appearance of each of his poems and essays. He never disappointed them. From "Old Ironsides," which he wrote in 1830, to his elegy to Francis Parkman sixty-three years later, he always found a popular response. And even today, who doesn't know "The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay" and "The Last Leaf," and perhaps Dr. Holmes's most famous poem, "The Chambered Nautilus," with its magnificent lines:
Build thee more stately mansions,
O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell
by life's unresting sea.
Charles Eliot Norton said of Holmes: "He was the last of a famous group of five men—Emerson, Lowell, Longfellow, Whittier and himself—firm friends, and all of the same stamp. … This school, which is now dead, was typically American, free, genial, optimistic, democratic, moral."
Jacket by John F. Morris
