Life & Wisdom Quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Holmes is doing that genteel 19th-century trick: pretending to fuss over aesthetics while really taking a sly jab at civic vanity. “Chicago sounds rough to the maker of verse” isn’t about urban danger or gritty streets; it’s about phonetics, the poet’s supposed sensitivity to sound. “Chicago” lands with hard consonants and that blunt, two-beat stomp. For a writer raised on classical euphony and polished New England diction, the word itself feels like a cultural irritant - not quite fit for the parlor, too young and loud for the page.

Then comes the pivot, and the joke sharpens: “One comfort we have - Cincinnati sounds worse.” The line works because it’s a mock consolation, as if poets must endure the democratic horror of American place-names the way they endure bad weather. But the subtext is competitive and coastal: cities are rising, commerce is shifting westward, and the old cultural centers are watching the map redraw itself in real time. Holmes doesn’t argue against Chicago’s importance; he reduces it to a syllabic problem, a way of keeping the new power at arm’s length.

“Cincinnati sounds worse” is also a neat bit of meter and mouthfeel: a polysyllabic tangle that forces the tongue to trip, turning linguistic awkwardness into a punchline. The sting is that both cities are being judged not by what they are, but by how they can be made to behave in a poem - a reminder that taste often disguises itself as technical critique. Holmes is defending poetry’s old standards while quietly admitting America won’t cooperate.