POETRY AT THE BREAKFAST OR DINNER TABLE.

POETRY AT THE BREAKFAST OR DINNER TABLE. The AUTOCRAT comes from an earlier world with a different taste in poetry. The Autocrat recites poetry at the breakfast table. Some of it is good light verse (a specialty of Holmes). But the rest is in a dated 19th century diction, hopelessly out of fashion now, but which my father, who was born in Wisconsin in 1903, might well have liked. My father would recite verse at the dinner table—HORATIUS AT THE BRIDGE, SHERIDAN’S RIDE, “The stag at eve had drunk his fill….” Mary Jane was startled once to find that my father thought of Walter Scott as a poet rather than a novelist. When I was growing up I came across a book on my father’s shelves must have come from Wisconsin at the turn of the century. It featured speeches for elocution and tableaux, which probably constituted important entertainment in small town America (Lily Bart takes part in a tableau in THE HOUSE OF MIRTH). My father had studied elocution as a boy, and I think that made it natural for him to think of poetry as something recited as well as read.