Text: Alphonso G. Newcomer, “The Poe-Chivers Tradition Re-examined,” Sewanee Review (Sewanee, TN), vol. XII, no. 1, January 1904, pp. 20-35

[page 20:]

To the present generation the name of Thomas Holley Chivers is known, if at all, as one that is in some dim manner connected with the name and fame of Edgar Allan Poe. He was a Southerner, who wrote poetry; but whether as a forerunner, disciple, or mere parodist of the greater poet, few would undertake to say. Even these two facts could not be learned from the ordinary American biographies and literary histories. The voluminous old “Duyckinck” and the late catholic “American Anthology” of Mr. Stedman both ignore his existence. Mr. Stedman, in his “Poets of America,” mentions him incidentally, and magazine articles have from time to time shed over him somewhat of illumination with rather more of mystery, with the total result that the general attitude of students of our literature toward him has been one of either complacent indifference or irritated contempt. The persistence, however, of his obscure fame argues a sufficient cause; and, moreover, in view of the high and permanent place which Poe holds, it is desirable that the status of a poet who succeeded in linking his name so closely with Poe's should be precisely determined. An attempt to do this has lately been made by Prof. James A. Harrison in his edition of Poe's works; but it is believed that the present investigation, which was carried on quite independently, will show that the conclusion there recorded is somewhat hasty and considerably too sweeping.

Chivers was born near Washington, Ga., in 1807 or 1809.(1) [page 21:] Graduating in medicine at Transylvania (now Kentucky) University, he went North and married; and from 1837 onward, according to dates attached to his poems, divided his time between New York, New Haven, Conn., and “Villa Allegra,” Decatur, Ga., being sometimes at all three places in the same year. He had sufficient property to make him virtually independent of his profession. He made his home finally at Decatur, dying in 1858. His four eldest children died of typhoid fever in infancy in close succession. Many of his poems were, as he called them, “the saintly children of his sorrowful love.”

He published in all some ten or twelve volumes and pamphlets, chiefly of verse, beginning with “The Path of Sorrow” (Philadelphia, 1832), and ending with “The Sons of Usna, A Tragic Apotheosis in Five Acts” (Philadelphia, 1858). Six of these have been examined by the present writer. The four most important, apparently comprehending everything of value that Chivers wrote, are: “Nacoochee; or, The Beautiful Star, with Other Poems,” New York, 1837; “The Lost Pleiad, and Other Poems,” New York, 1845; “Eonchs of Ruby, A Gift of Love,” New York, 1851; “Virginalia; or, Songs of My Summer Nights: A Gift of Love for the Beautiful,” Philadelphia, 1853. The last-named, together with a pamphlet of twenty-four pages, “Atlanta; or, The True Blessed Island of Poesy: A Paul(2) Epic in Three Lustra,” Macon, Ga., 1853, is in the British Museum. The old statement, repeated by Prof. Harrison, that the Museum contains a complete set of his works, is incorrect.

The intrinsic value of the poetry is not great; neither, as will be seen, is it so small as to warrant dismissing it with contempt. But the point of primary interest lies undoubtedly in the similarity of much of it to Poe's poetry, and about this has grown a controversy. While Poe was yet alive [page 22:] Chivers seems to have intimated privately that Poe was indebted to his poem “To Allegra in Heaven” for certain elements in “The Raven.” Then in 1853, four years after Poe's death, he made an open charge of plagiarism in the Waverley Magazine, adducing numerous examples in evidence. In this way, rightfully or wrongfully, he secured a certain fame which he probably would not have secured otherwise, and it is this matter especially which needs adjudicating. The most cursory comparison of his lyrics with Poe's will reveal an enormous amount of indebtedness on one side or the other.

The first bit of evidence is quite against Chivers. Poe's “Israfel,” with its motto and its familiar line, ‘Whose heartstrings are a lute” (in connection with which there is some further curious and very interesting history), was published in the “second edition” of his “Poems” in 1831. In 1836 Poe was on the staff of the Southern Literary Messenger, and in that magazine reprinted, among other things, “Israfel.” Chivers had already been industriously bombarding the magazine with his own poems; for in 1835 appeared an editorial rebuke to one “T. H. C., M.D.,” who, like Keats before him, was advised to keep to his lancet and pill box. Chivers therefore certainly read Poe's verses, and it is equally certain that Poe thus early saw Chivers's verses in manuscript. In 1837 Chivers published “”Nacoochee; or, The Beautiful Star.” The title suggests Poe's “Al Aaraaf,” yet it is merely a Simms-like Indian name for an Indian legend. The volume is further made up of a curious jumble of religious hymns, Byronic blank verse, and Shelleyan lyrics. There is just one line in it all — ‘’With an ecstasy of love” — which sounds like an echo of “Israfel.” However that be, in Chivers's next published collection there is a poem dated 1842, in which the angel Israfel himself appears, to become thereafter one of the poet's regular and much-abused properties.

This new collection of poems, “The Lost Pleiad” (another stellar title), was published in 1845, six months after Poe's fame was so widely spread by the appearance of “The Raven.” It contains plenty of evidence of a trivial nature that the author was familiar with Poe's poems and tales. On the [page 23:] other hand, it contains a lament on the death of the poet's mother, dated 1839, with the refrain of “No, nevermore,” a matter perhaps equally trivial, but one to which Chivers tried to attach some importance. Of greater importance is the poem upon which more specifically he founded his later charge. This is “To Allegra Florence in Heaven.” It is dated December 12, 1842, and, the author tells us, was first published then. His dates seem to be in every case trustworthy. Two years, therefore, before “The Raven,” whenever written, took final shape for publication, this poem had appeared. A few lines (divided in the original) will show its character:

Certainly in spirit and in movement this is a fair model for “The Raven.” Chivers's distinct claim was that he was the first “to make the trochaic rhythm express an elegiac’ theme,” the first to employ a certain method of alliteration, etc. Against this may perhaps be set a fragment of the same movement from the earliest published form of Poe's “The Bridal Ballad” (Southern Literary Messenger, January, 1837):

This, however, notwithstanding its movement, quite lacks the poetic quality — the peculiar atmosphere — of the poems under discussion. That atmosphere we find in another poem of Chivers's which he says was published in a Philadelphia newspaper as early as 1836, and which, though he did not himself emphasize it, presents as strong evidence as any in the case. It is entitled “Ellen Aeyre,”’ and runs thus:

This may well be conceived to be some of the base metal which Poe transmuted with his finer fancy. Only it is a pity he did not transmute it all; the atrocious word debonair, for instance, mars several of his poems.

To the credit of both poets it should be said that neither, at this time, 1845, hinted at any undue imitation by the other. On the contrary, Poe's characterization of Chivers in his article on “Autography” contained considerable praise; and now, in the summer of 1845, when the volume of Chivers appeared, Poe reviewed it most favorably in the Broadway Journal, and reprinted there one of the poems, “To Isa Singing,” which, by the way, contains these lines:

The fact is that at this stage the two were about even on the score of mutual indebtedness, though Poe's indebtedness must have been quite unconscious, while Chivers's occasional imitations, so far as they were conscious, were mostly of the patent kind that indicate only an honest admiration — a distinction that Poe was always acute enough to make.

Chivers published no more books until after Poe's death. Then, in 1851 and 1853, he published four volumes in rapid succession. These contain a great variety of poems, chiefly short lyrics, and among them most of those which have usually been quoted as showing the manner of Poe. In “Eonchs of Ruby” may be found “Lily Adair:” [page 25:]

In the same volume is “The Lusiad” —

with which compare Poe's “The Haunted Palace.” There are even more patent imitations, in which sometimes the fantastic nomenclature manufactured by Poe is freely employed, but it is needless to multiply examples.

The volume “Virginalia” contains testimony of exceptional value because many of the poems bear dates, from 1832 onward. The early poems are commonplace, with the exception of one which seems to have been inspired by Tennyson's “The Poet.” Dated 1842 is a poem entitled “Uranothen” (another Greek form), with an Israfelian echo, and with many words and phrases, such as “mystic hydromel,” “hyaline,” “light-ensandaled feet,” “cherubimic truths,” which possibly suggest Poe, but rather more strongly Shelley and Miss Barrett. By 1846 appears a

(Has any one before Poe, or any one except Poe and Chivers, used the English form Aiden?) The poems dated after Poe's death — that is, from 1849 to 1853 — bear almost without exception marked traces of Poe. There are such rhymes as “angel-evangel,” “lion-zion-Orion,” “Chalice-Alice,” “written-litten” [page 26:] (a word of Poe's devising). The vocabulary grows grotesque — ”ulpsyche,” “suckets,” “melphonic,” “anthosmial” — and Poe's celestial imagery becomes very observable. Without dates are several parodies:

These were overlooked by Mr. Ingram, who made a collection of parodies on “The Raven.” There is also a serious poem, a requiem on the death of Henry Clay, which is a deliberate paraphrase of “The Bells.” A poem valled “Lily Adair” contains four additional stanzas in the same measure as those similarly entitled in the preceding volume. On the same plan is constructed “Rosalie Lee,” in six stanzas, the third of which (the second below) has often been quoted, but always so incorrectly as to make grammatical nonsense of it.

The poem is not dated, but stands immediately after a poem called “The Fall of Usher,” which is a threnody on the death of Poe.

In this free and easy manner, then, between 1849 and 1853, Chivers was allowing his Muse to riot on the patrimony: of the dead poet. If his practice elicited no protest, it might be because it was considered unworthy of notice, or it might be because so much of his work was done in real admiration of one who had been his friend. It seems more likely, however, that there was some protest, which would account for Chivers's action in attempting to turn the charge of plagiarism against Poe. In the same year in which he publicly did this, 1853, he published at Philadelphia “Memoralia; or, Phials of Amber, Full of the Tears of Love.” An examination of this volume reveals that it was made by taking “Eonchs of Ruby,” discarding the long initial poem, substituting six short, worthless ones, and binding them up with the remaining sheets under a new title. The poem discarded was “The Vigil in Aiden.” In it one Politian is represented as mourning for his lost love, Lenore, who, dying, promised him that they should meet in the Rosy Bowers of Aiden “for evermore.” But Lucifer, the “damned Demon,” conjures up visions in an endeavor to seduce him from Lenore, declaring “with the voice of his dear Leman” that he shall meet her “never — nevermore.” The maiden, however, appears to him in a vision, confirming her promise, and the poem ends with his triumph over the demon and his translation to Aiden and Lenore. Clearly Politian is Poe, and Lenore is Poe's Lenore, and the entire poem is at once a sort of pendant to “The Raven,” a tribute to the genius of the poet, and an elegy upon his death. With some diffuseness, some declamation, [page 28:] and a few falls from poetic grace, it is still a pretty creditable poem, one of the best of the many poems written in this style (though also overlooked by Mr. Ingram), and decidedly one of the most ambitious poems Chivers ever wrote. The suppression of it must have some connection with the controversy which arose at that time. Yet it could hardly have been suppressed simply because it might seem to weaken Chivers's case. Other Poelike poems were allowed to stand; and besides Chivers pretty consistently took an attitude of offense and not defense. It appears most probable that in his growing feeling against the memory of Poe he wished to withdraw such a manifest tribute.

Such is the evidence collectible from Chivers's published volumes. It seems to establish several facts. The most patent is this: that after the year of Poe's widespread fame (1845), Chivers, with a remarkable native gift for melodious versification, and already an occasional imitator of Poe, came strongly under the influence of Poe's poetry, and then began to produce, and after Poe's death collected for final publication, nearly all of his poems that so strikingly resemble Poe's. . This was done, too, in friendliness of spirit, and the charges of plagiarism, which came with a peculiarly bad grace from one so deeply in debt, were a late development. These charges, however, so far as they imply a certain amount of quite legitimate and scarcely conscious obligations, are also seen to be not without foundation, and Prof. Harrison should not be allowed to dismiss them as of no significance. “To Allegra in Heaven” does contain both the movement and something of the sentiment of ‘”“The Raven;”’ and there is that peculiarly euphonious line in the still earlier “Ellen Aeyre,”

which, set by the side of a dozen different lines in “The Raven,”

furnishes corroborating evidence of a convincing kind. However [page 29:] much, therefore, Chivers both initially and finally owed to Poe, it is of the highest probability that Poe also owed something initially to Chivers, and the two poems just mentioned must be taken along with Tennyson's “Locksley Hall,” Mrs. Browning's “Lady Geraldine's Courtship,” Dickens's “Barnaby Rudge,” and what not besides, as having played their little part in the genesis of “The Raven.” Moreover, the man who, in 1836, could write “Ellen Aeyre,” with the line above quoted, had, even after Poe's Lenores and Annabel Lees and the rest, some title to go on writing his own Isadores and Rosalie Lees and beautiful, dutiful Lily Adairs without making any very profuse apologies to Poe. Of course it is still Poe who made these themes and the manner of treating them effective, and it is a fatal admission of weakness on the part of Chivers that he accepted the leadership of Poe. Chivers, indeed, does not seem to have recognized the value of the peculiar outcroppings of his genius until Poe worked the vein, and then he industriously set about working it after him. Even then he did not succeed in extracting pure gold; Poe alone did that.

In connection with the particular subject of the genesis of “The Raven” there is another matter that seems worth considering. Albert Pike's “Isadore” (or “The Widowed Heart”), which was published in The New Mirror in 1843, is sometimes spoken of as a prototype of “The Raven.” The third stanza of the poem is as follows:

“Illusory,” indeed, as Mr. Stedman says, is the fancied likeness of “The Raven” to this. But on the other hand there can be no illusion in finding in this poem of Pike's echoes both of Moore and of Tennyson's “May Queen.” And this prompts the observation that the influence of Tennyson's [page 30:] earliest poems upon American verse has not been sufficiently recognized. The “May Queen” appeared in 1832. Tennyson's earlier volume (1830) contained, it will be remembered, a number of little poems addressed to or written about women with melodious names — Claribel and Isabel, Mariana and Oriana, Madeline and Adeline, Rosalind and Eleanor. American magazine verse of the ensuing decade was full of these sentimental effusions. The Isabels and Isadores and Rosalie Lees are simply countless. The new influence, of course, was tempered or intensified by the lingering influence of Moore and Byron and Shelley. Tennyson himself derived from Keats. But it is clear just what kind of poetic ferment was working in the brains of our lyrists, especially in the Middle and Southern States, where transcendental philosophies did not avail to quench the ardors of very human amorists. The noteworthy thing is that the lovely maidens who inspired their lays were so often transferred to heaven, which brought in a profusion of celestial machinery — Aiden, for instance, and the seraphic host. Now Albert Pike, unless the poem has given rise to the story, lost his wife and mourned her in “Isadore.” Chivers had lost his children, and his life was profoundly saddened. Both of these men would easily fall into the mood of the morbidly sentimental “May Queen.” Is it too much to conjecture that out of these personal afflictions sprang a tendency which found its culmination in the loftily conceived and musically expressed “Raven” of Poe, with the imaginary lost Lenore for inspiration?

This extended comparison has incidentally revealed the qualities of Chivers's verse, so that but little need be said in conclusion respecting its intrinsic value. The opinion of the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, who found in it, according to “his poor taste, not much poetry,” may be disregarded. The editor's taste is no less self-condemned than self-confessed, for he printed multitudinous verses of the “O breathe again” and “‘Tis sweet to rove” variety. But Poe's criticism in his article on “Autography” (1841) is worthy of attention: [page 31:]

Abating the exaggeration of praise in the last sentence, this, though written before most of Chivers's work was done, remains a very fair estimate. He is precisely a poet of glimpses and snatches, with no intelligent control of his really remarkable gifts. He could write very fair humorous verse, and yet he had not the saving sense of humor to keep him from writing some perfectly ludicrous serious verse. His genius was to madness so terribly near allied that the partitions usually broke quite down, and he has suffered from the intemperate praise of equally unbalanced readers who felt the power of his melody and imagination without being able to feel the countervailing defects. At his worst, one can hardly say how bad he is. He will gather conventional and conflicting epithets into a jumble of sheer nonsense. His “Atlanta” shows what the riotous romanticism of Keats's “Endymion” can lead to. Again, his verse is often utterly flat and colorless. Always with him, facilis descensus Averni, as sometimes with Poe himself. Take this:

Or this, of Byron:

Indeed, one hesitates to make any serious claim for a poet who could write

Yet when Chivers gets away from his scarcely inspired religious or amorous verse, and, by good fortune escaping bathos, takes a cometary flight into those regions of which the human imagination is sometimes made free, the result is startling. In “The Poet of Love,” for example, we read of

It is easy to say “Sound and fury!” but after all such sound and fury is not often put into verse. Chivers's delight in the sound is manifest enough. In the same poem the “Corybantine Horns” become “Conchimarian Horns” and “Chrysomelian Horns.” But resonant names like these are a legitimate element in verse, and when we remember what an important element Poe was wont to consider them we can understand his own high praise.

Mr. Swinburne is said to have discovered Chivers in his youth and to have read him with delight. Take the lines in “Rosalie Lee” cited above:

Any one familiar with Mr. Swinburne's early poetry would, with the highest confidence, pronounce these lines to be his. Or take this stanza from “Lily Adair:”

Then read Mr. Swinburne's “Dolores:”

Or take once more Chivers's “To Isa Singing:”

Then read Mr. Swinburne's “Fragoletta” or “Felise,” weighing carefully the cadences. His debt to Chivers is as patent as his debt to Alfred de Musset.

On the fly leaf of Evert A. Duyckinck's copy of “Memoralia,” now in the Lenox Library at New York, is written (not in Duyckinck's hand): “Formula for Chivers: Shelley, 20 per cent; Poe, 20 per cent; mild idiocy, 20 per cent; gibbering idiocy, 20 per cent; raving mania, 10 per cent; sweetness and originality, 10 per cent;’‘ with some profane defense of Chivers in still another hand. It is the ten per cent of sweetness and originality, and, if mathematics will allow it, another ten per cent of rhythm and imagination, that one would like to rescue from these almost forgotten verses. “The Lusiad,” of which a stanza is quoted above, has a modulated music that becomes really captivating as one pursues it through stanza after stanza, and there is little but the wretched pun in the title to make one aware of the fatal limitations of the eccentric poet. As a final example of Chivers at his wildest and best may be cited here a poem, the fifteenth line of which once elicited Bayard Taylor's admiration:

APOLLO.

No such renascence awaits Chivers as overtook the fame of Blake, but some little echo of his music merits a furlough from oblivion. There are less worthy poems than the foregoing in every anthology of American verse that has neglected to give him a place.

ALPHONSO G. NEWCOMER.

Stanford University.

Note. — The documentary evidence brought forth in “The Poe-Chivers Papers,” recently edited for the Century Magazine, January-February, 1903, by Professor Woodberry, tends throughout to support the foregoing conclusions, which were based almost wholly on internal evidence. Moreover, Professor Woodberry's opinion that Chivers “was in parallelism with Poe, so to speak, and was attracted to him till he coalesced,” is precisely in accord with the conclusions drawn above, as against Professor Harrison's more radical view. One point of interest in the personal history of the two men is that Poe, in need of money for his publishing ventures, had reasons of policy for cultivating the friendship of Chivers, and he might therefore have tolerated in Chivers's poetry liberties which he would have resented from a Longfellow. Yet the weight of evidence leaves finally no room to doubt that Poe's friendship was as sincere as he was capable of feeling for any man, and that all his published criticism of Chivers's work represented his real opinion. Another point is made clear: that there was [page 35:] a definite protest against Chivers's flagrant imitation of Poe. A letter to him from Simms, April 5, 1852, exhorted him earnestly to “give up Poe as a model and guide.” Doubtless this was as instrumental as anything in precipitating the subsequent discussion, in which Chivers, under the influence of what Professor Woodberry calls his fully developed “Orphic egotism,” claimed everything and conceded nothing. “The Vigil in Aiden” is specially mentioned, but it is defended with equal assurance, so that there still appears no better reason for its suppression than the one offered above. In the matter of Mr. Swinburne's delight in Chivers, Mr. Stedman's observation takes in Professor Woodberry's hands a wholly humorous aspect: “Swinburne was known, among American friends, to exercise the divine right of inextinguishable laughter over such verses.” It may be; but, if so, Chivers would have something to reply for himself at the bar of divine consistency. A. G. N.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 20:]

1 The date commonly accepted is 1807. Prof. Harrison's reason for adopting 1809 finds a little additional support, perhaps, in the fact that Chivers dated one of his early poems, a sort of parody on “The Old Oaken Bucket,” at “Transylvania University, April 10, 1830.” Chivers was graduated from Transylvania “in or about 1828,” says Mr. Joel Benton. Apparently he was not graduated before 1830; and twenty-one is a somewhat more probable age for graduation at that day than twenty-three. It looks, therefore, a little as if the date of his birth has in some manner been set back two years, carrying with it subsequent calculations. But the matter is of no real importance. Poe was born in 1809.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 21:]

2 So runs the puzzling title, quite unexplained by anything in the poem itself, which is an Indian tale. Prof. Harrison conjectures, “A Prose Epic.” But there is no possibility of such error. The poem is in blank verse, and the British Museum copy is one originally presented by the author to Horace Greeley, containing corrections in the author's hand.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 24:]

3 The word Eonch seems to be a free adaptation of the Greek word which has been transferred into English as conch. Chivers uses it in the sense of “a shell.”