Newspaper Page Text
Page 22
Flagpole Magazine
March 18, 1992
Ghost Fry by John Seawright
Taliaferro’s Weird-Worded Wonder
The South in general — Georgia in par
ticular — has never been a fertile field for
poetry, song lyrics perhaps excluded. Geor
gia natives Sidney Lanier, Conrad Aiken
and James Dickey have their safe places in
the big anthologies, as does adoptive Geor
gian James We'don Johnson. There are
others, such as Byron Herbert Reese, whose
small but solid accomplishments may never
be properly recognized.
But poets can find worse immortalities
than the purgatory of the jumbo poetry col
lections or the limbo of out-of-print obscu
rity. There is always the lonely, dismissive
footnote, the chuckling parenthesis, and
the stern, unforgiving appendix at the back
of some thick volume. To such hells has
been consigned the reputation of northeast
Georgia’s most famous poet, Dr. Thomas
Holley Chivers, M.D.
Thomas Holley Chivers (pronounced
“shivers") was born on October 18,1809 on
his family’s plantation in south Wilkes (now
north Taliaferro) county, Georgia. When
William Bartram passed within a few miles of
what would thirty-five years later be Chivers’s
birthplace he saw miles of parklike hard
wood forest and clear rivers filled with golden
fish which, through his descriptions, would
resurface in the poetry of Samuel Taylcr
Coleridge. The young Chivers witnessed
the destruction cl this paradise at the hands
of his cotton-planting family and neighbors
(who included Andrew Stephens, father of
Chivers’s childhood friend and future con
federate vice-president Alexander H.
Stephens). Neither the paradise nor its de
struction were to leave much of a trace in
Chivers’s profoundly self-absorbed poetry:
the landscapes he needed for his verse he
borrowed from Coleridge’s moonlit deliri
ums, never knowing them to be, in some
small part, the scenes of his own childhood.
Young Chivers was schooled by private
tutors on the plantation and at his family’s
town home in nearby Washington. At nine
teen he married his sixteen year old first
cousin, Frances Chivers, a union by no
means so unusual then as now. The mar
riage did not last a year. After the birth of
their daughter Frances took the child and
fled to her family — Chivers was never to
see either again. Frances claimed that her
husband had treated her cruelly—Thomas
said that she had come under the influence
of malicious gossip about him spread by
one of their mutual aunts. In 1828, angry and
humiliated, Chivers left for Kentucky and
enrolled as a medical student at Transylvania
University.
Chivers completed the two-year course
and was licensed as a physician in 1830.
Although he would practice medicine little if
at all, Chivers was proud of his professional
status and would sign all of poems and
other publications "Thomas Holley Chivers,
M.D." His dissertation was titled “Remittent
and Intermittent Fevers," a subject of more
than academic interest to Chivers, for it was
while suffering from a childhood fever that
he had had the first of the visionary experi
ences that would form a major part of his
spiritual and poetic development. This first
vision involved a
visitation by angels
to his sickroom, fol
lowed by streams
of “living water’
pouring down the
walls. These an
gels, bright and
dark, were never to
be far from Chivers
for the rest of his
life.
After graduation
Chivers, reluctant to
return to the famil
iar scenes of his
recent disgrace in
Georgia, set out on
a two year journey
on the western
frontier followed by
two years of short
term residence in
the cities of the
northeast. He then
returned to Geor
gia and practiced
medicine in the ru
ral Taliaferro
county community
of Sandy Cross. After two years he returned
north, living in hotels and rented rooms. This
pattern of continual restless relocation, made
possible by his vast land — and
slaveholdings managed by capable over
seers, would typify most of the rest of
Chivers’s life.
In 1837 he met and married another
sixteen year old, Harriet Hunt of Springfield,
Massachusetts, even though he had never
been divorced from his first wife; Georgia
law considered a marriage null after five
years of abandonment by either spouse.
Frances Chivers had tried to get a divorce
for years, but Chivers had fought every
attempt, either out of hope of reconciliation
or, more likely, out of reluctance to lose
control of Frances's considerable estate. A
formal divorce was finally granted in 1844.
One of Chivers’s peevish letters to his
longsuffering attorney, Alexander Stephens,
reveals much of his view of human life. After
telling Stephens that he has remarried, com
plaining of Stephens s socializing with
Frances’s brother, and asking a few ques
tions about legal matters, Chivers ends his
letter, "I now conclude, wishing you immedi
ate death, or more happiness than I ever
saw..." For Chivers, death had become a
beckoning door leading to a fantastical
heaven which, as
his biographer, S.
Foster Damon,
said, was more real
to him than Geor
gia.
Chivers had
begun to write po
etry while in medi
cal school. His ear
liest work is excru
ciating autobiogra
phy in poor imita
tion of Byron. He
soon branched out
into verse drama,
didactic verse, and
patriotic and histori
cal odes. Before
long the weird vi
sionary strain that
would become his
signature was mak
ing its way into his
writing. Chivers
was a prolific writer
who seems to have
sent poetry and ar
ticles to every
newspaper and
magazine in the country. His work was pub
lished from Macon to Boston to Cincinnati
and from time to time he would have a
voLme of poetry printed at his own ex
pense.
Chivers’s poetry at its best is magnifi
cent near-nonsense; at its worst it is among
the very worst verse ever published and
preserved. His grasp of grammar and punc
tuation was never very sure. Considering
normal English to be inadequate to his ex
alted purpose, Chivers ransacked the dic
tionary for words like “amaranthine,"
"chrysomelian," and "reboantic." Our
language’s innate hostility to rhyme found a
brave enemy in Chivers: when a. loss for a
rhyme word he would concoct a name of
some imaginary place, person, or thing and
proceed boldly. We will, for example, never
know the nature of the “milk-white Una’ of
one of his better known works, except that it
serves as a suitable rhyme for "Paphian
Luna." Even when freed from the terrible
demands of his own rhyme schemes,
Chivers grew impatient with English, coin
ing such words as one which appears in one
of his titles, E onchs of Ruby. Responding to
an inquisitive critic, Chivers patiently ex
plained that "eonch" was the way he pre
ferred to pronounce and spell “conch." The
critic was presumably so grateful that he
neglected to ask how a conch could be
made out of ruby. Chivers was constantly
experimenting with rhyme schemes and
metrical patterns, sometimes with interest
ing, more often with disastrous results. Had
he burned a thousand of his poens and
published a certain dozen or two he might of
been hailed as one of the great technical
innovators of English verse, but he lacked
even the most rudimentary critical sense.
Here is Chivers at his best, writing about
the death of his sister:
Up through the hyaline ether-sea
Star-diademed, in chariot of pure pain,
Through th 'empyrealstar-fires radiantly,
Triumphant over Death in Heaven to
reign,
Thy soul is gone, seeking its Blest Abode,
Where break the songs of stars against
the feet of God.
And here he is at one of many worsts, the
next-to-last stanza of a very long poem on
the death of a pet lamb:
And while it stood there by my side,
A rope around its neck I tied,
Expecting soon, with joyful pride,
To take my sister out to ride.
Then, rubbing it upon the head,
Thus to myself I softly said,
“ Wait till I get some crumbs of bread"—
When I got back, the lamb was dead!
Such horrors are rarely encountered
outside the work of McGonnigle, the bad
bard of Dundee, yet Chivers rubs our nose
in as bad and worse on every page. He is
bad in a dozen ways; the reader laughs,
then is slightly sickened, and finally closes
the volume with a dull sense of wonder that
an intelligent and well-read man could have
been so utterly insensible. But Chivers was
not without his admirers, chief among them
dark colossus of antebellum letters, Edgar
"Dr- Thomas Holley
Chivers is one of the best
and one of the worst poets
in America.”
— Edgar Allan Poe
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