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The Lost Pleiad: And Other Poems
reprint
Thomas Holley Chivers
Printed by E.O. Jenkins, 1845
Literary Criticism; General; Literary Criticism / General; Poetry / General
Nacoochee: Or, The Beautiful Star, With Other Poems
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
This book was originally published prior to 1923, and represents a reproduction of an important historical work, maintaining the same format as the original work. While some publishers have opted to apply OCR (optical character recognition) technology to the process, we believe this leads to sub-optimal results (frequent typographical errors, strange characters and confusing formatting) and does not adequately preserve the historical character of the original artifact. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as blurred or missing pages, poor pictures or errant marks may have been introduced due to either the quality of the original work or the scanning process itself. Despite these occasional imperfections, we have brought it back into print as part of our ongoing global book preservation commitment, providing customers with access to the best possible historical reprints. We appreciate your understanding of these occasional imperfections, and sincerely hope you enjoy seeing the book in a format as close as possible to that intended by the original publisher.
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This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923....)
This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections
such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact,
or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections,
have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works
worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.
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Eonchs Of Ruby: A Gift Of Love; Volume 333 Of American Culture Series
reprint
Thomas Holley Chivers
Spalding & Shepard, 1851
Literary Criticism; General; Literary Criticism / General; Literary Criticism / Poetry
(This historic book may have numerous typos and missing te...)
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1851 Excerpt: ...moss That did the old gray rocks emboss, Beside tho stream it could not cross--It lay lamenting its groat lou I In pale cold swoon, with do# bedlght, Low in the Moon's soft ams of light, This lily lay in beauty bright Snowing her whitenoss on the night. IT. For as tho little dappled Fawn, Out of the lily-jdwoled lawn, At daybreak, eyes the milky Swan Floating upon the Lake at dawn-So did she from the emerald lea Of this dark life gaze silently At lambs beneath the Big Oak tree, Sporting in joyful jubilee. T. Thus all day long adown the Vale Vocal with her eternal wail, She wandered sighing Out her tale Upon tho suckle-seented gale. Sometimes amid the verdant bowers, Attended by the joyful Hours, She scattered dew from off the flowere Down on her limbs in pearly showors. vI. Thus orphaned on the dewy mead, Solf-exiled in her utmost need, A weary, weary life indeed Did she among the lilies lead At noontide, with the wild Giielles, Amid the flowery Asphodels, She learnt to drink from dewy wells That fountalnod in the lily-bells. vII. The Fawn may seek the mountain Doe-Down from the Hills may leap the Roe To whore the saintly lilies blow All night upon the Vales below; The amorous fiW flloj eome again Back t8 tn8 f:1. f ifftsper Cane But for her r, th has slain, She all night loug »hall wait in vain! j VIII. For three long months in bitter cold, With child-like plaint, it meekly told Its sorrows to tho snowy fold That fleeced all night the open wold. At midnight by the purling rill That carolled down the echoing Hill, She heard the plaintive Whippborwill Beg to be whipt--keeps begging still. iz. I took it from the place it lay, And bore it to sweet Alioo Gray--The little Lamb that lived half way To Heaven above--the Child of May. It never, from the first, ...
Nacoochee: Or, The Beautiful Star, With Other Poems - Primary Source Edition
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This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923....)
This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections
such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact,
or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections,
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Nacoochee: Or, The Beautiful Star, With Other Poems
Thomas Holley Chivers
W. E. Dean, printer, 1837
Thomas Holley Chivers was an American poet. At the start of his career, he practiced medicine and later devoted himself completely to writing.
Background
Thomas Holley Chivers was the grandson of Thomas Holley Chivers, who emigrated to Virginia in the mid-eighteenth century but eventually became one of the first settlers of Georgia; and the son of Colonel Robert Chivers, who in 1806 married a Miss Digby. He was born on October 18, 1809 on his father’s cotton-farm a few miles south of the recently founded Washington, Georgia, United States. The date is determined by a poem in Conrad and Eudora, written October 18, 1834 “on the Anniversary of my Twenty-fifth Year. ”
Education
Thomas was educated at a Georgia preparatory school and studied medicine at Transylvania University, Lexington, Kentucky. In 1830 he wrote his thesis on Intermittent and Remittent Fevers and obtained his Doctor of Medicine degree with distinction.
Career
Chivers began to practise medicine about 1830 but left it soon. Meanwhile he had been writing verse. In 1831 he traveled in “the West, ” visiting in March the Cherokees, with whose sufferings he sympathized strongly; some of the Indian material in his later poems may have been collected then. In 1832 he printed privately, for distribution among friends, The Path of Sorrow, or the Lament of Youth: A Poem, written while studying medicine in 1828-1829.
In 1833 he was writing more poems, in the Mississippi Valley, and St. Louis. In 1834 he came North and started to print privately at Philadelphia his Conrad and Eudora; or, the Death of Alonzo, a five-act version of the Sharpe-Beauchamp murder of 1826, which follows (at times almost verbatim) a pamphlet, The Confession of Jcreboam O. Beauchamp (1826); the second half of the volume consists of twenty-nine lyrics grouped together as Songs of the Heart. The verse is either bad or indifferent, with some lines characteristic of his exalted mysticism, but with none of the Poe-esque music which he developed later.
In 1837 he went to New York, where he published Nacoochee; or, the Beautiful Star, his third book and first published volume, which evidently contains all the juvenilia which he thought worth preserving. The title-poem is an unfinished Indian legend, with a symbolic metaphysics that may have suggested Poe’s later “Ulalume, ” though otherwise the two poems are unlike, “Nacoochee” being written in rather Keats-like Spenserians. The preface is a curious though nebulous statement of Chivers’s beliefs as to the transcendental nature of poetry.
On April 1, 1838, at Philadelphia, he wrote a sonnet on receiving the news of the death of his mother, and went South for the funeral. In 1839, he was at New York again, preparing a play for presentation: Leoni; or, the Orphan of Venice. The plot was a complete reworking of the Sharpe-Beauchamp murder, somewhat in the manner of Otway, though with Drydenesque metaphors. It is dignified and well-sustained throughout.
In 1840 he received a prospectus for the Penn Magazine from Poe, to whom he wrote on August 27, with much enthusiasm but no money. In Graham’s Magazine, which eventually published thirteen of Chivers’s poems, Poe published in his “Autography” in December 1841 a brief critique of Oliver's manuscripts submitted for publication but not published, in which Chivers was characterized as “one of the best and one of the worst poets in America. ” Chivers protested twice by letter, and was answered at last on June 6, 1842: Poe had revived his plans for the Penn Magazine and apologized for the squib. Chivers promised to get subscribers, but complained that the squib had confirmed a popular rumor that he was mad. The correspondence continued, and Poe accepted three poems for Graham’s Magazine. Henceforth Chivers’s work appeared regularly in various magazines, until about five years before his death.
In the spring of 1845, he went to New York, to publish a new volume, The Lost Pleiad and Other Poems. While there he met Poe several times (helping him home in an intoxicated condition on the first occasion), and after his return to Georgia there ensued a correspondence between the two poets—Poe crying desperately for ready money and Chivers, apparently, giving only good advice and an invitation to come South to be taken care of by him for the rest of Poe’s life.
Attracted by the visions of Andrew Jackson Davis, Chivers, in 1848, contributed liberally to Davis’s Univerccelum, both poems and prose, including the “Scene from Via Coeli; or, the Way to Heaven, a Moral Drama in Five Acts, ” which contains an account of his own visions. In the same year he published a pamphlet, Search After Truth; or a New Revelation of the Psycho-Physiological Nature of Man. After Poe’s death he wrote a “New Life of Edgar Allan Poe, ” a rhapsody intended to place Poe as a great poet, without concealing his weakness; the manuscript remains unpublished, except for fragments edited by Prof. Woodberry in the Century Magazine (January-February, 1903).
In the latter part of 1850, Chivers published at New York his Eonchs of Ruby, A Gift of Love, a mixture of ultra-musical verse and gorgeously extravagant imagery, with verse collected from the magazines, and much stuff that should have been destroyed. The very evident influence of Poe immediately caused various charges of plagiarism, and there began a controversy which cannot be said to have ended yet. Chivers defended himself at first in private letters with considerable heat, and finally broke out, under the signature of “Fiat Justitia, ” in the Waverly Magazine (1853), accusing Poe with much blindness and fury of stealing the “Raven” from “To Allegra Florence in Heaven, ” and quoting the very worst stanza from it as proof. At last the editor closed the controversy with justifiable harshness. The truth of the matter seems to be that Poe and Chivers at first developed their melodic theories of verse independently; that Chivers later followed Poe’s lead for some time; that Poe saw in Chivers’s more careless work material which he could entirely make over; while Chivers, gaining courage from Poe’s example, freely helped himself to Poe’s rhymes and names and tricks of refrain. But after Poe’s death, Chivers continued his experiments far beyond anything that Poe had ever done.
In 1853 he published three more volumes of poetry. Memoralia; or Phials of Amber Full of the Tears of Love was nothing but the unsold copies of Eonchs, the first twenty-six pages of which were replaced with a new title-page, index, preface, and six poems. His second volume was Virginalia, or Songs of my Summer Nights, less known than Eonchs. His third volume for 1853 was Atlanta, or the True Blessed Island of Poesy, “a Paul Epic in Three Lustra, ” which appeared as a pamphlet at Macon, Georgia. The preface includes many ideas apparently taken from Poe’s Poetic Principle (1850), but is dated July 18, 1842; and elsewhere Chivers insisted on his priority.
In 1854 he wrote a five-act play, The Sons of Usna: a Tragic Apotheosis (published, 1858), which is the first literary treatment in English of the famous legend of Deirdre (barring mere translations and paraphrases, as well as Macpherson’s “Darthula”). In 1836, he returned South; was asked by a committee to write a Fourth-of-July Oration; and wrote and published in pamphlet form, but did not recite, his Birthday Song of Liberty. On December 18, 1858 he died at his home, Villa Allegra, Decatur, Georgia. He always was utterly unable to judge his own productions; and Poe’s original squib about him still holds. Yet his best work is frequently poetry of a high order, and his originality (despite any question of plagiarism) is unquestionable.
“Except yourself I have never met the man for whom I felt that intimate sympathy (of intellect as well as soul) which is the sole basis of friendship. ” - Edgar Allan Poe
Connections
In 1827, Chivers married his 16-year-old cousin Frances Elizabeth Chivers. The two soon separated. While in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1834, Chivers met and married Harriet Hunt, daughter of George and Jerusha (Smith) Plunt of that city, a famous beauty aged sixteen at the time of her marriage. On June 25, 1839, his daughter Florence Allegra, was born; a year later, his son Aster; in these two children he recognized the harp-playing angels of the vision of a decade before. On his thirty-third birthday, October 18, 1842, Florence Allegra was struck down by a virulent form of typhoid, and died in her father’s arms that night. Another daughter was born to him in 1842, but within a year he lost his three other children.