[In the following essay, Benton examines Chivers's accusations of plagiarism against Edgar Allan Poe.]

Very few people to-day, even in literary circles, know anything about Thomas Holley Chivers, M.D. And even these know very little. He was a poet of at least one book before Bryant made that brief anthology of sixty or more American poets in 1840;—mostly names that have vanished long since into the everlasting inane;—but he was not there represented. His first volume of verse appeared in 1837, though fugitive lyrics from his pen were doubtless afloat on the periodical seas long before that year. Poems over his signature were contributed as late as 1853 to Graham's Magazine and to the Waverley Magazine of Boston.

It is, however, simply repeating an indubitable fact, to say that a large part of the poetry of Chivers is mainly trash,—of no account whatever, and not above the reams of stanzas which from time immemorial have decorated as "original" the country newspaper's poet's corner. But now and then he struck a note quite above this dead and wide-pervading commonplace; and, whenever he did, the verses brought forth were apt to suggest the mechanism and flavor of Poe. He not only said at various times—especially in a series of letters which he wrote to Mr. Rufus W. Griswold, Poe's biographer, and which are now in the possession of his son—that Poe had borrowed largely from him, but he put the transaction in much bolder terms. The charge of flagrant plagiarism of himself by Poe, in respect even of "The Raven" and "Annabel Lee," was not withheld, but was violently advanced by Chivers. Nor was he alone in making this charge. Some of his friends took it up and repeated it with a vehemence and an ability worthy of a most sacred cause. There is circumstance enough about this, to say nothing of its singularity, to elevate Chivers into something of a topic,—one worth considering at least for a moment.

What is known about this author is, that he published seven or eight volumes of poems between, and inclusive of, 1837 and 1858,—a period of twenty-one years. Many of them antedate Poe's period of literary activity, and not a few have the Poe afflatus and melody so strongly inherent in them that even the non-critical reader could not mistake their related quality. In Chivers's "Lily Adair," which crowns his high-water mark of poetic achievement, the Poe manner stands out conspicuously. This refrain from it, for instance, varied in some details at the end of each stanza, illustrates what I mean:—

In her chariot of fire translated,
Like Elijah, she passed through the air,
To the city of God golden-gated—
The home of my Lily Adair—
Of my star-crowned Lily Adair—
Of my God-loved Lily Adair—
Of my beautiful, dutiful Lily Adair.

Chivers, in this poem, and in others which resemble Poe's work, made Biblical allusion a dominant trait to an extent that Poe did not, and really attained, though not always with perfect sanity, to much of Poe's witchery and charm.

It is not my intention in this article to repeat the history and evidence which I presented and published elsewhere a year and a half ago concerning Chivers's claims against Poe. It will be sufficient for the purpose now in hand if I report, as briefly as may be, what Chivers and his friends, and those who antagonized the Chivers assumption, had to say about it forty-four years ago.

In a quite able and stalwart way Chivers himself opened the contest, under the nom de plume of "Fiat Justitia," in the Waverley Magazine of July 30, 1853. In a long article, entitled "Origin of Poe's 'Raven,"' he claims that the laudators of Poe—particularly N.P. Willis, who said of "The Raven" that it "electrified the world of imaginative readers, and has become the type of a school of poetry of its own"—"betray not only a deplorable ignorance of the current literature of the day, but the most abject poverty of mind in the knowledge of the true nature of poetry." He then quotes from his own book, The Lost Pleiad, the following lines from the poem "To Allegra in Heaven," which was published in 1842,—a few years before "The Raven" appeared. He asserts that these lines "show the intelligent reader the true and only source from which Poe obtained his style" in that poem:—

Holy angels now are bending to receive thy soul ascending
Up to Heaven to joys unending, and to bliss which is divine;
While thy pale cold form is fading under
Death's dark wings now shading
Thee with gloom which is pervading this poor broken heart of mine!

And as God doth lift the spirit up to Heaven there to inherit
Those rewards which it doth merit, such as none have reaped before;
Thy dear father will to-morrow lay thy body with deep sorrow,
In the grave which is so narrow, there to rest forevermore.

In this article Chivers also says that Poe is not entitled to priority in the use of the refrain "Nevermore." It was Chivers, he says (still writing under his nom de plume), who originated this in a poem entitled "Lament on the Death of my Mother," published in 1837 in the Middletown, Connecticut, Sentinel and Witness. The following extract from it is the proof he offers:—

Not in the mighty realms of human thought,
Nor in the kingdom of the earth around;
Nor where the pleasures of the world are sought,
Nor where the sorrows of the earth are found—

Nor on the borders of the great deep sea,
Wilt thou return again from heaven to me—
No, nevermore!

The reader, I imagine, will be likely to think that Poe gave this refrain a more potent and appalling quality.

It is urged that Poe knew of Chivers's The Lost Pleiad, and Other Poems, as he "spoke of it in the highest terms in the Broadway Journal in 1845 [Vol. 2, No. 4]." The writer admits that "Poe was a great artist, a consummate genius; no man that ever lived having possessed a higher sense of the poetic art than he did." But he urges that this fact must not obliterate the other; viz., that he took the liberty, arrogated by genius, to borrow.

After saying that Chivers (he speaks of himself all along as another person) was the first poet to make the trochaic rhythm express an elegiac theme, and the first to use the euphonic alliteration adopted by Poe, he cites the following extract from a poem of his published before Poe's masterpiece in verse appeared:—

As an egg, when broken, never can be mended, but must ever,
Be the same crushed egg forever, so shall this dark heart of mine,
Which, though broken, is still breaking, and shall nevermore cease aching,
For the sleep which has no waking—for the sleep which now is thine!

To step up to "The Raven" from so grotesquely low a level, one might easily consider—even were the charge of plagiarism proved—a complete absolution of blame.

And, if this is admitted to be the fountain whence Poe got his form, an irreverent critic might say he reproduced it with unsurpassable effect and dissociated from it the atmosphere of Humpty-Dumpty.

In the Waverley Magazine of August 13 of the same year, "Fiat Justitia" (Chivers) is taken in hand by "H. S. C." and "J. J. P.," on behalf of Poe. The difference in altitude and genius of the two writers is emphasized by them. Poe's personal character is palliated; but the question of priority in the use of the Poe alliterative rhythm is not argued. The only reply touching this is by the first of the two writers, who shows that "Nevermore," as a refrain, is nobody's trademark, since it has been used even earlier than Chivers's employment of it. As an instance buttressing this statement, he offers the following stanzas from a very old scrap-book in which the poem of which they are a part is credited to the Cheshire, England, Herald:—

Now the holy pansies bloom
Round about thy lonely tomb;
All thy little woes are o'er;
We shall meet thee here no more—
Nevermore!

But the robin loves to sing
Near thee in the early spring;
Thee his song will cheer no more
By our trellised cottage door
Nevermore!

The same writer asks if his antagonist cannot, by his form of logic, prove that Poe stole his poem of "The Bells" from the nursery rhyme of "Ding Dong Bell." A week later than this, "Fiat Justitia" reappears in the Waverley Magazine, together with an ally signing himself "Felix Forresti" (possibly Chivers again), who, seeing him attacked by two knights of the pen, "takes up the cudgels" for Chivers. In fact, to be more truthful, all these writers—speaking metaphorically—take up pitchforks and machetes. Their Billingsgate style savors of the Arizona Howler, and seems impossible to Boston. In this week's onslaught, however, no point of note occurs, except that the latter writer exhumes from a poem by Chivers, upon Poe, which was published in the Georgia Citizen about 1850, the following lines:—

Like the great prophet in the desert lone,
He stood here waiting for the golden morning;
From Death's dark vale I hear his distant moan
Coming to scourge the world he was adorning—
Scorning, in glory now, their impotence of scorning.

And now in apotheosis divine,
He stands enthroned upon the immportal
mountains
Of God's eternity, for evermore to shine—
Star-crowned, all purified with oil-anointings—

Drinking with Ulalume from out th' eternal
fountains.

And the writer adds: "Until both … champions [of Poe] can write just such lines as these, they had better 'shut up shop."'

But neither side "shut up shop" just then. In the issue of September 10, "Fiat Justitia" and "J. J. P." reappear. The former occupies nearly three columns with extracts from Chivers's poems to show the Poe manner, and to prove that it was in these poems Poe found it. The following sample is from The Lost Pleiad:—

And though my grief is more than vain,
Yet shall I never cease to grieve;
Because no more, while I shall live,
Will I behold thy face again!
No more while I have life or breath,
No more till I shall turn to dust!
But I shall see thee after death,
And in the heavens above I trust.

The following extract is from Chivers's Memoralia:—

I shall never more see pleasure,
Pleasure nevermore, but pain—
Pleasure, losing that dear treasure
Whom I loved here without measure,
Whose sweet eyes were Heaven's own azure,
Speaking, mild, like sunny rain;
I shall nevermore see pleasure
For his coming back again!

Of The Lost Pleiad volume, "Fiat Justitia" says that a Cincinnati reviewer declared, some years ago, that "there is nothing in the wide scope of literature, where passion, pathos, and pure art are combined, more touchingly tender than this whole unsurpassed and (in our opinion) unsurpassable poem."

Another sample of Chivers's pre-Poe likeness the writer finds in a poem titled "Ellen Æyre," which was printed in a Philadelphia paper in 1836. He gives this stanza from it:—

Like the Lamb's wife, seen in vision,
Coming down from heaven above,
Making earth like Fields Elysian,
Golden city of God's love—
Pure as jasper—clear as crystal—
Decked with twelve gates richly rare—
Statued with twelve angels vestal—
Was the form of Ellen Æyre—
Gentle girl so debonair—
Whitest, brightest of all cities, saintly angel,
Ellen Æyre.

Very many other Poe-resembling extracts are given; but these must suffice from the verse. To show that Poe borrowed from Chivers in a prose criticism, our writer copies the following passage from an article by Chivers in the Atlanta Luminary:—

There is poetry in the music of the birds—in the diamond radiance of the evening star—in the sun-illumined whiteness of the fleecy clouds—in the open frankness of the radiant fields—in the soft, retiring mystery of the vales—in the cloud-sustaining grandeur of the many-folded hills—in the revolutions of the spheres—in the roll of rivers, and the run of rills.

Now look on this, from Poe's "The Poetic Principle":

He recognizes the ambrosia, which nourishes his soul, in the bright orbs that shine in heaven … in the waving of the grain-fields—in the blue distance of mountains—in the grouping of clouds … in the twinkling of the half-hidden brooks—in the gleaming of silver rivers—in the repose of sequestered lakes—in the star-mirroring depths of lonely wells … in the song of birds—in the sighing of the night-wind … in the fresh breath of the woods, etc.

Triumphantly the writer says, "Now … you will no longer wonder where Poe obtained his very delightful knowledge of the art of poetry." Not only the Chivers prose extract, but also the verse passages quoted by him were written, he affirms, "long anterior" to the parallel passages in Poe.

In the Waverley of September 24 following, "J. J. P." quotes Poe as saying of "The Raven," "I pretend to no originality in either the rhythm or metre." He also quotes Poe as saying of the passage by Chivers containing the egg simile: "That the lines very narrowly missed sublimity we will grant; that they came within a step of it we admit; but, unhappily, the step is that one step which, time out of mind, has intervened between the sublime and the ridiculous."

The whole controversy was continued with warmth in the Waverley Magazine of October 1, 1853, by "Fiat Justitia," who began it. I am told, too, that it was reopened in a later volume. As the Magazine office files were long ago destroyed by fire, I cannot say how the renewed controversy fared; though it probably closed with nothing fresher than new epithets coined by the combatants. Nor is anything that is particularly new added by this article. It was mainly a threshing of the old straw, which, all the way through, was supplemented by a rhythm analysis that would take too much space to follow. From the Chivers poem "To Allegra in Heaven" he adduces this theretofore unquoted line,

Like some snow-white cloud just under Heaven
some breeze
has torn asunder—

which he thinks suggested Poe's two lines:—

And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each
purple curtain—

Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear
discourse so plainly.

Chivers, it seems, wrote for a variety of periodicals, among which were Graham's Magazine and Peterson's; and in the year this controversy was raging he contributed poems to the Waverley Magazine itself. In "Fiat Justitia's" contention, it is said that Poe was obliged to reply in the Broadway Journal, in defence of the plagiaristic charge, to some writer using somewhere the nom de plume of "Outis." There was, in connection with the Chivers assumption and advocacy, a surprisingly earnest and hot assault. Only one more of these militant articles (possibly by Chivers again) shall I notice here. He, signing himself "Philo Veritas" in the Waverley Magazine of October 8, 1853, communicates a "Railroad Song" taken from Graham's, which was written by Chivers, and which he terms "a truly original poem." He does so in part for the purpose of "exposing one of the most pitiful plagiarisms" known—the "wishy-washy thing" entitled "Railroad Lyric," that had appeared in Putnam's Monthly of the previous May. Here are some lines from the one hundred and thirteen composing Chivers's poem:—

All aboard! Yes! Tingle, tingle,
Goes the bell as we all mingle—
No one sitting solely single—
As the steam begins to fizzle—
With a kind of sighing sizzle—
Ending in a piercing whistle—

And the cars begin to rattle,
And the springs go tittle-tattle—
Driving off the grazing cattle,
As if Death were Hell pursuing
To his uttermost undoing,
Down the iron road to ruin—
With a clitter, clatter, clatter,
Like the Devil beating batter
Up in Hell in iron platter,
As if something was the matter;
Then it changes to a clanking,
And a clinking and a clanking,
And a clanking and a clanking—

As if Hell for our damnation,
Had come down with desolation

While the engine overteeming
With excruciating screaming,
Spits his vengeance out in steaming.

Still repeating clitter, clatter
Clitter, clatter, clitter, clatter
As if something was the matter—
While the woodlands all are ringing,
And the birds forget their singing,
And away to Heaven go winging.

Then returns again to clatter
Clitter, clatter, clitter, clatter
Like the Devil beating batter
Up in Hell in iron platter—
Which subsides into a clankey,
And a clinkey and a clankey
And a clankey and a clinkey
And a clinkey, clankey, clankey—
Then to witchey, witchey, witchey,
Chewey-witchey, chewey-witchey—
Chewey-witchey, witchey, witchey,
Then returns again to fizzle,
With a kind of sighing sizzle—
Ending in a piercing whistle—
And the song that I now offer
For Apollo's golden coffer—
With the friendship that I proffer—
Is for riding on a Rail.

There was one poem of Chivers's, entitled "The Little Boy Blue," copied in the Waverley Magazine, which is singularly saturated with the nomenclature and manner that Poe affected. Here are a few illustrative stanzas out of the thirty-seven to which it extended:—

The little boy blue
Was the boy that was born
In the forests of Dew
On the Mountains of Morn.

There the pomegranate bells—
They were made to denote
How much music now dwells
In the nightingale's throat.

On the green banks of On,
By the city of No,
There he taught the wild swan
Her white bugle to blow.

Where the cherubim rode
On four lions of gold,
There this cherub abode
Making new what was old.

When the angels came down
To the shepherds at night,
Near to Bethlehem Town
Clad in garments of light,

There the little Boy Blue
Blew aloud on his horn,
Songs as soft as the dew
From the Mountains of Morn.

But another bright place
I would stop to declare,
For the Angel of the Face
Of Jehovah was there.

Now this happy soul dwells
Where the waters are sweet,
Near the Seven-fold Wells
Made by Jesus's feet.

Not only are the Poe phrases here, but here, too, is the tossing, tumultuous imagination of William Blake. I know of no writer who, so much as Chivers did, fell into Blake's phantasmagorial extravagance.

The upshot of this cursory consideration of the voluminous controversy—beginning before Poe died, and virulently continued for some years after his death—shows that Poe knew Chivers's work and paid attention to him in more than one reference. The literary representatives of the minor poet appear, also, to bring forward some striking examples of verse which he wrote, which was outwardly like Poe's, and which considerably antedated "The Bells," "The Raven," and "Annabel Lee," on which Poe's poetic fame rests.

What conclusion must be drawn from these facts? Each reader will be certain to make his own. No critic will doubt that to Poe belonged the wonderful magic and mastery of this species of song. If to him who says a thing best the thing belongs, no one will hesitate to decide that Poe is entitled to the bays which crown him. It is a fact, that, with all the contemporary airing of the subject, it is Poe's celebrity and not Chivers's that remains. The finer instinct and touch are what the world takes account of. Chivers, except at rare intervals, did not approach near enough to the true altitude. He put no boundary between what was grotesque and what was inspired. He was too short-breathed to stay poised on the heights, and was but accidentally poetic. But we may accord him a single leaf of laurel, if no more, for what he came so near achieving in the musical lyric of "Lily Adair." Truly enough Shakespeare says:—

The lunatic, the lover and the poet,
Are of imagination all compact …

Their mental and spiritual territories interblend. The same frenzy is the endowment of each—as charcoal is in essence the diamond. As you differentiate and develop it you make your titular distinction and place. But it is not a small thing to have been mingled in some slight association with genius, and to have some credit you with it. In an Oriental poem the clay pipe speaks of its contentment, since it cannot be a rose, of having, by a fortunate association, attained to some of the rose's fragrance.