Newspaper Page Text
Page 12
Flagpole Magazine
April 1, 1992
Ghost Fry by John Seawright
Thomas Holley Chivers, Part II: Poe and Beyond
Dr. Thomas Holley Chivers, M. D. of Washington, Geor
gia, absentee plantation owner, non-practicing physician
and prolific visionary poet returned home from his long
wanderings in the autumn of 1842 to bury his beloved
daughter, Allegra Florence. In December of that
year he composed the first of what would be
many poems in his daughter's memory, “To
Allegra Rorence in Heaven.’ The poem was
given a scathing review a few months later in the
pages of Orion, a literary magazine published in
Athens by William Carey Richards. Chivers also
sent a copy of the poem to his friend and regular
correspondent, Edgar Allan Poe.
Poe and Chivers had been in contact for two
years but had never met. Despite many personal
differences the two men shared a remarkable
range of opinions on life and poetry Both were
fascinated with death and paradise, with the
philosophy of transcendentalism, and especially
with the musical qualities of language. They read
(and borrowed from) the same books, admired
the same poets, and read and commented on
each other's work. “To Allegra Florence in
Heaven" seems to have made an impression on
Poe The last verse of Chivers's poem should
have a familiar ring to anyone with even the briefest ac
quaintance with American poetry:
And as Cod doth lift thy spirit
Up to heaven, there to inherit
Those rewards which it doth merit
Such as none have reaped before;
Thy dear father will, tomorrow,
Lay thy body with deep sorrow,
In the grave which is so narrow—
There to rest forevermore!
Two years later, in January 1845, Poe published “The
Raven" and achieved overnight fame. Shortly thereafter
Chivers paid a visit to New York and the two poets met for
the first time, the sternly teetotalling Chivers getting the
privilege of escorting the drunken Poe home after a literary
evening. During the four remaining years of Poe's life the
two men continued their friendship by mail, Poe asking for
money, Chivers ignoring his requests, but inviting Poe to
move down to Wilkes county with his family. Nowhere in
their correspondence does either mention the striking simi
larities between "To Allegra Florence in Heaven’ and The
Raven.’ Shortly after Poe’s death, Chivers published Eonchs
of Ruby, which included “To Allegra Florence.’ Critics
nationwide assailed him as a second-rate plagiarist, a
vulture feeding on Poe’s fame. Chivers was furious, but,
rather than attacking the critics, he turned his fury upon his
dead friend. For years Chivers blanketed the country with
articles and letters to the editor denouncing Poe as a
plagiarist in the strongest terms. His attacks may be summed
up in his own words, published in 1852: “Poe stole every
thing that is worth anything from me.’ Chivers’s obsessive
attacks on Poe's reputation brought him a notoriety which
his poetry had never received. Always lacking any critical
sense, Chivers inevitably chose the very worst examples of
his own poetry to illustrate his claims, particularly the
unfortunate penultimate stanza of “To Allegra Florence’ in
which he compares his broken heart to a broken egg.
Chivers’s name swiftly became a national byword for lunacy
and bad taste. Undeterred, he jumped into the controversy
around the publication of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s
“Hiawatha.’ Longfellow was widely accused of having
stolen his meter and form from the Finnish national epic,
Kalevala. Yes, Chivers proclaimed, Longfellow was a filthy
plagiarist, but he hadn't been stealing from any Finnish
epic, but from dozens of Chivers’s own poems. This charge
was greeted with appropriate hilarity, and Chivers lost any
scrap of public dignity he might once have had.
The facts in the case of "The Raven’ are fairly
plain. Poe almost certainly seized on Chivers's
novel combination of meter and rhyme scheme,
modified it, and produced a poem of greater
subtlety and power than Chivers could ever have
written. This has always been the prerogative of
artists, poets particularly. What is strange is that
Poe chose “The Raven’ as his subject for “The
Philosophy of Composition,’ a minute examina
tion of how he wrote his poetry. Nowhere in the
essay does Poe hint that the poem’s form had any
origin outside his own brain. While Poe's "Philoso
phy of Composition’ hints at a bad conscience
Chivers’s posthumous attacks on Poe fairly scream
of one. Chivers stole from Poc, early and often His
thefts were clumsy and shameless, but never
remarked upon by Poe.
Chivers returned to Georgia in 1845 and. e*
cept for a few brief visits, never returned to the
north. His reasons for ending his wanderings are
unclear, but seem to have been part of the rapidly growing
sense of defensive isolation in the South over the matter ct
slavery. In 1855 he was invited to become a professor at
Oglethorpe Medical College in Savannah, but declined the
honor. In 1856 he abruptly left Washington and moved to
Decatur, probably because his eccentricities made him
increasingly isolated in the small town where he had grown
up. Thomas Holley Chivers died in 1858 and is buried in the
city cemetery in Decatur.
Chivers published twelve volumes of poetry, most of it
bad, but some worthy of saving. He was the first person to
transcribe slave songs and the first person to praise them
as poetry. He was the first author to use the materials of the
sensational Sharpe-Beauchamp murder case which was to
fascinate Southern writers for 130 years (read Robert Penn
Warren’s World Enough and Time and Poe’s Politian, but
avoid Chivers’s Conrad and Eudora). Chivers was also the
first author to write a tragedy based on the Irish legend of
Deirdre. Chivers’s work was read with interest by the Pre-
n aphaelite poets Rosetti and Swinburne, and had some
Oliver's work was
read by Rosetti
and Swinburne...
Kipling borrowed
several
unacknowledged
lines from
Chivers... Yea ts 9 s
“The Lake Isle of
Innisfree” closes
on a powerful echo
of Chivers's
“Nacoochee.”
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