This 1872 installment in Holmes’s popular Breakfast Table series is a fluent, gossipy exchange among the poet of the title and his breakfast companions—with the lion’s share of conversation belonging to the poet, who delivers his somewhat eccentric and fitfully amusing opinions of books, people, and habits of thought. Written fifteen years after the start of the series, The Poet takes a comparatively calm and nostalgic tone.
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Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809-1894) was an American physician and author whose essays were published regularly in The Atlantic Monthly—a magazine he named, and which still thrives today. As a doctor, Holmes was an influential early proponent of the germ disease of contagion, and pressed for the training of women and African American physicians.