/lit/ - Literature

Rachel Ingalls. Now that John Updike is dead, I can't find anybody who's heard of her, let alone who likes her as much as I do.

Oh, also Thomas Holley Chivers. The funniest poet you've never read. Although Edgar Allan Poe read him. Seriously, google him. Pic related.

Ever notice that Lord Byron's sister was named Augusta Leigh, but his wife was named (or nicknamed) Annabella?

Besides that, you might want to mention in your paper that Poe basically plagiarized it from a poem by his friend Dr Thomas Holley Chivers. Chivers's poem was entitled "Rosalie Lee", which obviously sounds silly and unmusical. Poe at least had the good sense to improve what he ripped off.

Many mellow Cydonian suckets
Sweet apples, anthosmial, divine,
From the ruby-rimmed beryline buckets
Star-gemmed, lily-shaped, hyaline;
Like the sweet golden goblet found growing
On the wild emerald cucumber-tree,
Rich, brilliant, like chrysophrase glowing
Was my beautiful Rosalie Lee.

Pic related: It's Dr Chivers. For more on his amazing work, see S. Foster Damon's biography "Thomas Holley Chivers: Friend of Poe."

What this has to do with Poe is indeed anyone's guess, but this certainly sounds to me like the kind of essay that gets written by people who teach in American universities. As Poe himself said--or maybe it was Chivers--in "The Poet's Vocation":

In the music of the morns
Blown through the Conchimarian horns,
Down the dark vistas of the reboantic Norns,
To the Genius of Eternity
Crying, “Come to me! Come to me!”

I could not express this sentiment better myself, although I would gladly refer back to Chivers' own critical assessment (found in his "Preface" to "Eonchs of Ruby") that "as the diamond is the crystalline Revelator of the achromatic white light of Heaven, so is a perfect poem the crystalline revelation of the Divine Idea."

Seeing as Poe quotes this same sentiment with evident approval in "Eureka", I can find no reason whatsoever to disagree with it, or with him, or even with Professor Charles X Kinbote of Miskatonic University, who is my secret internet boyfriend.

The End.