12 h 14 minAudiobook8 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at costPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
At a Boston breakfast table, a joke can open a question about faith, the mind, or growing old.
In The Poet at the Breakfast-Table, Oliver Wendell Holmes gathers lodgers around meals in a Boston boarding house. The old Autocrat leads the talk, now older and more watchful. Each person brings a manner and a point of view. Conversation wanders from medicine to belief, with wit making room for serious thought.
Holmes brings a physician’s eye and a poet’s ear to questions that touch daily life. How closely do thought and feeling depend on the body? What happens when faith becomes harsh? His breakfast-table talk explores language, memory, and age, offering the company of a sharp, kind mind rather than a brisk argument or a driving plot.
What you’ll discover
- Conversation as a way of thinking Join a table where different points of view give familiar questions fresh life.
- The body behind the mind Explore Holmes’s recurring idea that thought, feeling, and character rest on the body.
- Faith without harshness Follow his resistance to religious severity and his search for a kinder faith.
- Science beside poetry Discover how a physician and poet gives both ways of thinking a place.
- Wit, words, and memory Enjoy puns and odd phrases alongside reflections on age and the small moments that endure.
Who will love it
For readers who love wandering essays, nineteenth century wit, and a scientist and poet's thoughts on faith and the mind.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- Good talk is a form of thinking
- The body and the mind are bound together
- Faith should be kind, not harsh
- Science and poetry belong at one table
- Words and wit shape how we think
- Age, memory and the value of small things
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Der Dichter am Frühstückstisch
by Oliver Wendell Holmes · 1872
At a Boston boarding house, the witty Autocrat joins science, poetry and faith in conversation that can change a mind.
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From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1 of 6
Good talk is a form of thinking
Holmes builds the whole book on conversation. Instead of a treatise, he gives you a table with several people at it, each with a manner and a point of view. The talk drifts, doubles back and breaks off for a joke. That is deliberate. Holmes holds that ideas come alive when they bump against other minds, and that a mind at ease will say more than a mind on parade.
The lodgers are drawn as types as much as individuals. There are the young and the old, the learned and the plain, the believer and the doubter. Each one hears the same remark and takes it differently. Through these small differences, Holmes shows that any truth looks different from every chair at the table.
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What is The Poet at the Breakfast-Table about?
It is a book of conversation set at a Boston boarding house. A group of lodgers talk about science, faith, language, health and growing older, led by the witty Autocrat. It reads as essays in the form of table talk.
Do I need to read the other Breakfast-Table books first?
No. It is the third in a series, after The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table and The Professor at the Breakfast-Table, but the talk stands on its own. Knowing the earlier books adds familiarity with the Autocrat's manner.
Is The Poet at the Breakfast-Table a true story?
It is not a plain memoir. It is a literary work in which Holmes uses invented lodgers and a narrator to voice his own ideas. It first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly and came out as a book in 1872.
The author
Oliver Wendell Holmes
1809–1894 · American poet and physician
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (1809–1894) was an American physician, poet, and novelist. He was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and died in Boston. He taught medicine at Harvard. His books include The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1858), Elsie Venner (1861), and The Poet at the Breakfast-Table (1872).
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