Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

One of Oliver Wendell Holmes poems.

Ozymandias / Percy Bysshe Shelley The destruction of Sennacherib / George Gordon Byron The vision of Belshazzar / George Gordon Byron Alexander's feast / John Dryden Antony to Cleopatra / William Haines Lytle The angels' song / Edmund Hamilton Sears Boadicea / William Cowper The Pied Piper of Hamlin / Robert Browning Bruce to his men at Bannockburn / Robert Burns Lepanto / Gilbert Keith Chesterton The "revenge" / Alfred Tennyson The landing of the pilgrim fathers / Felicia Dorothea Hemans On the late massacre in Piedmont / John Milton The deacon's masterpiece / Oliver Wendell Holmes Paul Revere's ride / Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Concord hymn / Ralph Waldo Emerson On the extinction of the Venetian Republic / William Wordsworth Incident of the French camp / Robert Browning The star-spangled banner / Francis Scott Key On first looking into Chapman's Homer / John Keats A visit from Saint Nicholas / Clement Clarke Moore Old Ironsides / Oliver Wendell Holmes The Helen / Edgar Allan Poe Anne Rutledge / Edgar Lee Masters The charge of the Light Brigade / Alfred Tennyson Maryland, my Maryland / James Ryder Randall Battle-hymn of the republic / Julia Ward Howe Barbara Frietchie / John Greenleaf Whittier O captain! My captain! / Walt Whitman Invictus / William Ernest Henley The modern major-general / William Schwenk Gilbert The new Colossus / Emma Lazarus Recessional / Rudyard Kipling Cargoes / John Masefield Miniver Cheevy / Edwin Arlington Robinson In Flanders fields / John McCrae Fire and ice / Robert Frost

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., has been called the greatest jurist and legal scholar in the history of the English-speaking world--towering, brilliant, profound. His speeches, opinions, and letters rank among the most powerful documents of American political and intellectual life. By gathering a rich selection of writings in one volume, Richard A. Posner reveals Holmes in the fullness of his achievement as judge, historian, philosopher, belletrist, and master of English. Style. Although interest in Holmes appears on the rise of late--biographies and studies of his thought are flourishing--little of his actual writing is readily available; the bulk of Holmes's 10,000 personal letters, 2,000 judicial opinions, and numerous speeches and essays have remained unpublished. This anthology, which spans the half-century from 1881, when The Common Law was published, through his Supreme Court appointment in 1902, to the early 1930s, charts the. Interplay between Holmes's temperament and the social and intellectual struggles of his times. Thematically arranged, the volume moves from general to specific and covers a rich variety of subjects from aging and death to themes in politics, personalities, and law. Posner's substantial introduction firmly places this wealth of material in its proper biographical and historical context. Destined to become the standard one-volume edition of Holmes's writings, this. Anthology reveals Holmes not only as a great jurist and intellectual, but as a preeminent figure in American thought, sensibility, and expression.