Oliver Wendell Holmes Memorial - Boston, MA
Posted by: neoc1
N 42° 21.350 W 071° 04.486
19T E 329129 N 4691369
The Oliver Wendell Holmes Memorial is located on the Charles River Esplanade opposite Storrow Drive and Dartmouth Street in Boston, MA.
Waymark Code: WMMDA9
Location: Massachusetts, United States
Date Posted: 09/04/2014
Views: 3
Oliver Wendell Holmes was was a poet, novelist, biographer, and essayist as well as a physician. He was born on August 29, 1809 in Cambridge, MA, graduated from the Phillips Academy, Harvard College and Harvard Medical School. He wrote poetry at an early age and his most famous poem "Old Ironsides" was published when he was only 21, in 1830. The poem was influential is the saving of the USS Constitution, now the oldest commissioned ship in the world.
Holmes, along with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier, and James Russell Lowell were members of the Fireside Poets. A group of American poets whose works rivaled those of English poets. He often published his works in The Atlantic Monthly.
A 48' by 15' by 10' semi-circular plaza contains a exedra bench and two steps on which rests a small circular granite pedestal. The front of the pedestal is inscribed:
OLIVER
WENDELL
HOLMES
1809-1894
The back of the pedestal is inscribed:
PHYSICIAN
PHILOSOPHER
POET
A MAN HONORED
AND BELOVED
BY MANY
MCMXV
The bench is inscribed:
FOR OVER 20 YEARS
DR. HOLMES LIVED AT NO. 296
BEACON STREET. HIS LIBRARY
OVERLOOKS THIS MEMORIAL
Selected list of works from Wikipedia:
Poetry
Poems (1836)
Songs in Many Keys (1862)
The Last Charge
Medical and psychological studies
Puerperal Fever as a Private Pestilence (1855)
Mechanism in Thought and Morals (1871)
Table-talk books
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1858)
The Professor at the Breakfast-Table (1860)
The Poet at the Breakfast-Table (1872)
Over the Teacups (1891)
Novels
Elsie Venner (1861)
The Guardian Angel (1867)
A Mortal Antipathy (1885)
Articles
"The Stereoscope and the Stereograph", The Atlantic Monthly, volume 6 (1859)
"Sun-painting and sun-sculpture", The Atlantic Monthly, volume 8 (July 1861)
"Doings of the sun-beam", The Atlantic Monthly, volume 12 (July 1863)
Biographies and travelogue:
John Lothrop Motley, A Memoir (1876)
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1884)
Our Hundred Days in Europe (1887)