Holmes was well respected by his peers, and garnered a large, international following throughout his long life. Particularly noted for his intelligence, he was named by American theologian Henry James Sr. "intellectually the most alive man I ever knew".[134] Critic John G. Palfrey also praised Holmes, referring to him as "a man of genius ... His manner is entirely his own, manly and unaffected; generally easy and playful, and sinking at times into 'a most humorous sadness'".[168] On the other hand, critics S. I. Hayakawa and Howard Mumford Jones argued that Holmes was "distinctly an amateur in letters. His literary writings, on the whole, are partly the leisure-born meditations of a physician, partly a means of spreading certain items of professional propaganda, partly a distillation of his social life."[169]
Like Samuel Johnson in 18th-century England, Holmes was noted for his conversational powers in both his life and literary output.[170] Though he was popular at the national level, Holmes promoted Boston culture and often wrote from a Boston-centric point of view, believing the city was "the thinking centre of the continent, and therefore of the planet".[82] He is often referred to as a Boston Brahmin, a term that he created while referring to the oldest families in the Boston area.[171] The term, as he used it, referred not only to members of a good family but also implied intellectualism.[28] He also famously nicknamed Emerson's The American Scholar the American "intellectual Declaration of Independence".[172]
Although his essay on puerperal fever has been deemed "the most important contribution made in America to the advancement of medicine" up to that time,[69] Holmes is most famous as a humorist and poet. Editor and critic George Ripley, an admirer of Holmes, referred to him as "one of the wittiest and most original of modern poets".[173] Emerson noted that, though Holmes did not renew his focus on poetry until later in his life, he quickly perfected his role "like old pear trees which have done nothing for ten years, and at last begin to grow great."[92]
Poems by Holmes, along with those by the other fireside or schoolroom poets, were often required to be memorized by schoolchildren. Although learning by rote recitation began fading out by the 1890s, these poets nevertheless remained fixed as ideal New England poets.[174] Literary scholar Lawrence Buell wrote of these poets: "we value [them] less than the nineteenth century did but still regard as the mainstream of nineteenth-century New England verse."[175] Many of these poets soon became recognized only as children's poets, as noted by a 20th-century scholar who asked about Holmes's contemporary Longfellow: "Who, except wretched schoolchildren, now reads Longfellow?"[176] Another modern scholar notes that "Holmes is a casualty of the ongoing movement to revise the literary canon. His work is the least likely of the Fireside Poets to find its way into American literature anthologies."[177]
The school library of Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where Holmes studied as a child, is named the Oliver Wendell Holmes Library, or the OWHL, in his memory. Items from Holmes's personal library—including medical papers, essays, songs and poems—are held in the library's Special Collections department.[178] In 1915, Bostonians placed a memorial seat and sundial behind Holmes's final home at 296 Beacon Street in a spot where he would have seen it from his library.[179] King's Chapel in Boston, where Holmes worshiped, erected an inscribed memorial tablet in his honor.[135] The tablet notes Holmes's achievements in the order he recognized them: "Teacher of Anatomy, Essayist and Poet". It ends with a quote from Horace's Ars Poetica: Miscuit Utile Dulci: "He mingled the useful with the pleasant."[134]
