Besides publishing texts and translations, the other way to make the benefits of the Parry Collection broadly available was, as Parry had said, by "drawing a series of generalities applicable to all oral poetries." This meant a major work of research and textual analysis in the Parry Collection, with some supplementary study of other possibly oral poetry in other languages. Lord began to meet this responsibility too with the publication of his book The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1960).

But Parry's legacy at Harvard was not limited to his Collection nor to those who assayed the particular work that he himself had intended to do with it. A rich treasure of rare books passed from his personal library to the College Library's Folklore Collection at the time of his death. Moreover, a number of distinguished senior professors in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in the 1970s were associates or students of Parry during the five years that he taught at Harvard. Joining a faculty where such lights from the Kittredge constellation as Bartlett Jere Whiting still shone, the new men of the Parry era have been greatly instrumental in the continuing infusion of oral literary studies throughout Harvard's humanistic curriculum. Among these influential continuators of Parry's purpose were Reuben A. Brower, Cabot Professor of English Literature, John H. Finley, Eliot Professor of Greek Literature, Daniel H. H. Ingalls, Wales Professor of Sanskrit, and Harry T. Levin, Irving Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature.

The total influence of this century-old scholarly tradition is difficult to appraise exactly, because it has been so profound and far-reaching. The initial effects at each new stage of the tradition were felt most keenly in the world of higher learning, which was as it should be, for it was preeminently an academic tradition.