Overview

Though by profession a doctor (he coined the word anesthesia), Oliver Wendell Holmes was one of the leading nineteenth-century American poets and a member of the famous Saturday Club with Emerson, Longfellow, and Lowell. The year 2009 marked the two hundredth anniversary of his birth. Here are his major poems, including ""Old Ironsides"" and ""The Last Leaf"" in a rare audiobook collection read affectingly by Peter Marinker.

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9781094015972

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Fashions change in poetry just as they do in music or clothes. Once, Oliver Wendell Holmes was all the rage, and counted Poe and Lincoln among his admirers. Now, except perhaps for Old Ironsides and The Chambered Nautilus, he is remembered mostly as the father of the Supreme Court justice. Often witty, rarely personal, Holmes's poetry has passed into the realm of the specialist and historian. Yet in Peter Marinker's sensitive readings, the many charms of these poems emerge. Marinker lets the meter and rhyme stand on their own, speaking in sentences rather than forcing the lines and respecting the sentiment without falling into sentimentality. -- Audiofile

Author Information

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) graduated from Harvard in 1836 and practiced medicine for the next decade. He also taught at Dartmouth and became dean at Harvard Medical School. Despite his career as a physician, he is best known as a poet and humorist. Peter Marinker is a highly experienced stage actor whose credits include The Big Idea, Easy Access, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and The Merchant of Venice at the Old Vic. On television he has appeared in Bugs, Bodyguards, and Casualty, while his films include Event Horizon, Judge Dredd, The Russia House, and The Emerald Forest.

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