Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. — a remark

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“To write a lyric is like having a fit; you can’t have one when you wish you could, and you can’t help having it when it comes itself.”

Describing poetic inspiration as involuntary rather than something that can be summoned to order · Letter, The Victim of Correspondents

About Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

29 August 1809–7 October 1894

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., born 29 August 1809 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and dead 7 October 1894 in Boston, was one of the most recognizably versatile figures in nineteenth-century American culture: physician, medical reformer, anatomist, professor, poet, novelist, essayist, conversational satirist, and public…

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