The career of Oliver Wendell Holmes as a poet can be said either to have begun with tremendous good luck or an ironic example of bad luck, depending upon the point of view. That career began in earnest while a young man growing disaffected by studying law at Harvard. Holmes began writing verse for simply for his own sake as a means of distraction from the disappointment of studying law. What began as a lark soon turned into a catalogue of more than fifty, roughly half of which would eventually be published anonymously in a student-run periodical founded by classmates. Before the year was out and having just barely turned twenty-one, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the most famous poem he would ever compose and one of the most famous works of verse in the history of American literature.
“Old Ironsides” was composed due to a misunderstanding, yet another quirk of fate responsible for Holmes even adding poet to a long list of other distinguished achievements. The poem was written in response to reports that the USS Constitution was to be decommissioned and scrapped. The response by Holmes has often been credited as one of the criticisms of this decision that resulted in it being overturned. In reality, the report had been wrong; the old ship had never been headed to the scrap yard at all. Nevertheless, the poem has been a standard part of the elementary education curricula almost ever since, easily making it one of the most read poems ever written by an American writer.
The problem facing Holmes, of course, was how to follow such a resounding and popular success written right at the start of your poetry-writing career. The answer for was the same as it was for everything else at which he excelled: sit down and do it. Oliver Wendell Holmes is one of the textbook examples of the concept that art can't wait for inspiration; it is a task to be set to with purpose and conviction just like any other job. In addition to success as poet, Holmes wrote novels, essays, non-fiction books, medical texts, biographies and travel literature.
None of which brought him the fame during his lifetime or the legacy after his death which his poems afforded. Having become an instant celebrity with “Old Ironsides” by showing a gift for writing poetry to meet a topic rather than writing poetry springing from inspiration, the overwhelming bulk of his considerably large canon is comprised of occasional poems: poems commissioned for a specific event or observation. Although later poems like “The Last Leaf” and “The Chambered Nautilus” may be preferred by scholars and academics, Holmes ascended to a level of fame shared only by the likes of Longfellow mostly on the basis of writing poems-on-demand to observe with grace, elegance and dignity everything from a dinner to honor Ulysses Grant to the Semi-Centennial Celebration of the New England Society. Whether the occasion involved Presidents or the grand opening of a theater on New York City’s Fifth Avenue, Holmes consistently proved himself up to the job making even the most prosaic of topics worthy of commemoration in verse.
