Life & Wisdom Quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Holmes turns literary hierarchy into an industrial gag: the author as a bespoke invention, the critic as sawdust. The sentence is busy with mock-modern verbs - "invented, manufactured, and patented" - that drag romantic genius into the age of factories and trademarks. Art, in this view, isn’t some misty gift from the muses; it’s a production line, and nature is the ultimate capitalist, branding her wares. That hard-nosed diction is the setup for the punchline: critics are "chips", leftovers from the real work, animated only because waste has to go somewhere.

The intent is less to dismiss criticism entirely than to needle a certain kind of critic: the parasitic tastemaker who lives off what others produce. Holmes is defending the primacy of creation over commentary, and doing it with a smile sharp enough to draw blood. "Contrived" matters here: nature doesn’t accidentally generate critics; she deliberately makes them from scraps, as if even the ecosystem of letters requires scavengers. The subtext is Darwinian before Darwin fully lands in American public life: an ecology of culture where authors build and critics pick at the remains.

Contextually, Holmes is writing from 19th-century Boston, where magazines, reviews, and Brahmin gatekeeping helped decide what counted as "American" literature. His joke carries local resentment: a poet-physician watching a professional class of reviewers consolidate power. The line flatters authors, sure, but it also exposes the uneasy truth that every literary economy needs its waste managers - even when the waste talks back.