Although Thomas Holley Chivers's reputation, if not notoriety, has rested to a degree on his association with and similarity to Edgar Allan Poe, Chivers was a creditable poet in his own right. In his best works his ideas are evocative and his experiments in language and prosody intriguing. His poetry, as he explained in his prefaces and letters and demonstrated in his works, was transcendental, communicating the mystical connection between physical and spiritual reality. Thus, his imagery, often novel, sometimes bizarre, was conceived primarily as a medium to convey the highest truth. Like Poe and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Chivers considered the poet a purveyor of the beautiful, an artist who ultimately revealed the "divine Idea." Unlike Emerson, however, Chivers believed the emotional response to the sounds of poetry to be sine qua non. In his odd, flamboyant style Chivers treated such nineteenth-century conventions as the evanescence of youth...