Talk:Chivers' Life of Poe/GA1

GA Review[edit]

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Nominator: Pretzelles (talk · contribs) 15:04, 13 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Reviewer: Chiswick Chap (talk · contribs) 14:34, 14 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

It feels odd that we have images of 3 men other than Chivers, but not Chivers himself. Suggest this goes next to the brief background on him.

The sudden switch from "friendship" to accusations of plagiarism is remarkable. It would be helpful to have a brief bit of background on what modern scholars think was the actual state of affairs here. Was there a real friendship? Did one of the men copy from the other? this from Dekalb History Center may be helpful. (Arnavon, see below, says that "Chivers only knew Poe a little, wrote detestable prose, obscure and pretentious, while many of the details he presents are manifestly controversial, making one doubt the authenticity of the events he describes and claims to have witnessed." Not terribly encouraging, in fact. So perhaps the "friendship" didn't exist at all. It certainly needs to be unpicked and described in rather more detail.)

An older work on the subject is the 1899 book by Joel Benton (1832–1911), In The Poe Circle: With Some Account Of The Poe-Chivers Controversy And Other Poe Memorabilia. This should certainly be mentioned and cited in the article, if only to ensure that "the main points" are covered per the GA criteria; I suggest you give Benton similar coverage to Grisholm or Woodberry (including an image).

Benton's book may also be useful to help cover the item above about the Poe/Chivers relationship. Why, for instance, did Benton call it a "controversy"? Was he correct to do so? (Later scholarship will need to be cited to answer that last question.)

Timeline
Date	Event
1809	Poe born
1840s	Chivers/Poe "friendship"
1849	Poe dies Griswold obituary attacks Poe
1852	Chivers tries to publish Poe biography
1903	Woodberry publishes Chivers excerpts
1927	Chase studies Chivers' works
1952	Davis edits Chivers' Life of Poe

I found I wanted a timeline of the main events discussed; other readers may well feel the same, so I suggest you include one in the article, to help readers orient themselves to the names, dates, and events in the article.

Quinn's comments span two issues: whether Chivers wrote accurately about Poe; and whether publication was justified. These are not well lumped together under the rubric 'Historical accuracy', and should be clearly distinguished.

It is hard to believe that any "scandals" such as Poe/Osgood from 2 centuries ago could really still have that quality today, but since you mention the matter, the reader should be given brief details of the events and the arguments for and against publishing them. Mary G. De Jong's 1987 "Her Fair Fame: The Reputation of Frances Sargent Osgood, Woman Poet" might be useful.

The short comments on 'Editorial scholarship' are all contemporary with publication, i.e. 1952. What we are missing here is any sign of modern (late 20th century, or 21st century) scholarship. Scholar returns many 21st century results, none of which are currently used in the article. This looks like an issue for GA criterion 3a.

Issues of historical accuracy turn on two questions: Chivers's limited access to information, and any bias or personal agenda (fame as a poet?) he may have had. Both of these need to be explained with a bit of detail (did he actually know anything about Poe's early life, and did he make up any of it, if so what?) and one or two concrete instances (specific lines cribbed from Poe's verse?) so that readers can form a view of what happened and how accurate the book actually is.

There is a brief 1956 review of the book by C. Arnavon (free on ProQuest) which may say something useful. Arnavon calls the book only un ébauche (a draft, a sketch, a stub), implying that Chivers' attempts at publication were based only on a short sketch of the book to try to interest a publisher. If that is true (and it sounds plausible), then the article should not make it sound as if he was offering a (complete) manuscript to the publishers, which the phrase "The manuscript remained unpublished..." does suggest. Or perhaps the draft was lengthy: but then you'd need to explain why Davis had to do so much work to make it publishable.

I'd be inclined to reduce the size of the Chase image (using |upright=0.5, say) to make his face about the same size as that of Griswold's. I'd make Woodberry |upright=0.6 too. To save faffing about, I've made these small changes; feel free to tweak as you like.

The sources mainly end at 1952/3, with a few much older sources, and more recent scholarship limited to Lombard's 1979 biography of Chivers and Lemay's 1981 obituary of Davis.

I'm a bit concerned about GA criterion 3a "it addresses the main aspects of the topic". I'm not convinced that the twin questions of Chivers' actual knowledge of Poe (let alone friendship), and the book's factual accuracy about Poe and his relationships, have been adequately addressed in the article. I've made some half-educated suggestions, based on a quick look at what's available, and the results are not very encouraging. The article certainly needs work, probably with more detail and actual examples. These could well take the form of actual examples from the book, side-by-side with the historical facts about Poe's life, and preferably some scholarly comments on the discrepancies. There appear to be plenty of scholarly papers available on the Poe/Chivers situation, even limiting the search to 2000 onwards, so at least the best of these should be used to paint a fuller picture of the book's context and accuracy.

Given these remarks, the article will require revision. I will attempt a second pass when that is completed. Chiswick Chap (talk) 16:17, 14 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]