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God’s Scrivener

The Madness and Meaning of Jones Very

A biography of a long-forgotten but vital American Transcendentalist poet.
 
In September of 1838, a few months after Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his controversial Divinity School address, a twenty-five-year-old tutor and divinity student at Harvard named Jones Very stood before his beginning Greek class and proclaimed himself “the second coming.” Over the next twenty months, despite a brief confinement in a mental hospital, he would write more than three hundred sonnets, many of them in the voice of a prophet such as John the Baptist or even of Christ himself—all, he was quick to claim, dictated to him by the Holy Spirit.
 
Befriended by the major figures of the Transcendentalist movement, Very strove to convert, among others, Elizabeth and Sophia Peabody, Bronson Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and most significantly, Emerson himself. Though shocking to some, his message was simple: by renouncing the individual will, anyone can become a “son of God” and thereby usher in a millennialist heaven on earth. Clark Davis’s masterful biography shows how Very came to embody both the full radicalism of Emersonian ideals and the trap of isolation and emptiness that lay in wait for those who sought complete transcendence.
 
God’s Scrivener tells the story of Very’s life, work, and influence in depth, recovering the startling story of a forgotten American prophet, a “brave saint” whose life and work are central to the development of poetry and spirituality in America.

312 pages | 10 halftones | 6 x 9 | © 2023

Biography and Letters

Literature and Literary Criticism: American and Canadian Literature

Reviews

“In God’s Scrivener: The Madness and Meaning of Jones Very, Clark Davis doesn’t spend much time on his subject’s spectacular breakdown. Instead, relying on new research, he painstakingly reconstructs everything that came before and after. . . . Mr. Davis wonders, at the end of his fine biography, if the world really needs ‘the strange purity’ of Very’s voice. But if you like your poems plain and unfussy, written as if every word mattered and were meant for you and no one else, give Very’s poetry a try. You will even get the occasional piece of useful life advice. Feeling too wrapped up in your own concerns? ‘Open thy window, gaze abroad / Go forth and walk an hour.’”
 

Wall Street Journal

“Davis . . . enthusiastically argues for a ‘reevaluation of the existing biographical evidence’ in his sympathetic God’s Scrivener. . . . To Davis, Very in the end is a kind of hero devoted to his vision and voice, a maverick committed to something like the beatitudes. He emerges as a kind of protomodern figure, resolute and true, who casts ‘a strong light on the compromises and half-truths of others.’”

New York Review of Books

"Very is the subject of a meticulously researched, erudite, and patient new biography, God’s Scrivener. . . . One of God’s Scrivener’s many strengths is how it uses light reflected from the history of Transcendentalism to fix a fine-grained portrait of Very. He seemed unstable, but then, so did many of the transcendentalists. If there was madness in Very, it was perhaps only in taking Transcendentalism’s wildest ideas seriously enough to put into practice."

Poetry magazine

"Davis presents an extensive and thorough narrative of the complexities and incisive writings of poet Jones Very. He brings out the influence of Jones’s unique experiences and states of mind, on his development of his various forms of poetry and Christian-mystical transcendentalism. . . . Valuable for those interested in 19th-century New England culture and literature—poets, literary critics, theologians and philosophers, and historians."

Choice

God’s Scrivener is a thoughtful, moving, and deeply researched portrait of the otherworldly mystic and poet Jones Very. Clark Davis reveals that, far from being the punchline of an old joke, the unjustly forgotten Very was nothing less than the stillness at the heart of Transcendentalism, joining Thoreau and Whitman as one of the era’s great poet-prophets who articulated a powerful and innovative response to the pressures of modernity. Davis’s biography radically deepens our understanding of the movement’s potential and its limits, a message with surprising resonance today. This is essential reading for anyone who cares about Transcendentalism, the poetry of faith and doubt, or the place of Christian mysticism at the heart of America’s longing for a better world.”

Laura Dassow Walls, author of "Henry David Thoreau: A Life"

“Massively well researched and well argued, God’s Scrivener benefits from Clark Davis’s informed attention to a trove of documents not available fifty-six years ago when the last biography of Jones Very was published. By showing how the life, times, and works illuminate each other, Davis restores to us an author once considered one of the best sonnet writers in the language. Even as he establishes Very’s historical importance, Davis clearly explores both the strengths and dangers of his example.”

Robert Daly, author of "God’s Altar: The World and the Flesh in Puritan Poetry"

“Jones Very has been the lost Transcendentalist for decades, but Clark Davis has recovered him as a superb poet and penetrating spiritual mind in his remarkable God’s Scrivener. This is the story of a moving and enlightening life, artfully told.”

David M. Robinson, author of "Natural Life: Thoreau’s Worldly Transcendentalism"

God’s Scrivener, the first biography of the enigmatic and fascinating Transcendentalist poet Jones Very in more than half a century, is a masterful revaluation of both Very’s life and work. Davis’s careful analysis of Very’s sometimes ecstatic poetry and surviving accounts of his unconventional behavior help to make sense of Very’s state of mind during the period when he came to public attention in the intellectual, religious, and literary circles of Salem and the greater Boston area. Mining the poet’s neglected ‘commonplace books’ to great effect, Davis builds the most complete picture yet of the poet’s intellectual and spiritual development in his formative years.”

Helen R. Deese, editor, "Jones Very: The Complete Poems"

Table of Contents

List of Figures
Introduction
Prologue: 1823

I. “There is something very strange in it all”
1. Cousins
2. Federal Street
3. Eldest Son
4. Biography (I)
5. Cornelia Africana
6. Biography (II)
7. A Student’s Notes, 1833–34
8. A Poet’s Notes, 1834
9. Early Poems, 1833–35
10. The Uses of Faith, 1835
11. “Change of heart”
12. Scrapbook, 1835–36
13. Lamartine
14. Poems, 1835–36
15. “The Torn Flower”
16. Spiritual Freedom

II. “Flee to the mountains!”
17. “Part or particle of God,” 1836
18. The Messianic Moment
19. Mr. Tutor Very
20. Temptation and Peace
21. “My heart in life’s winter”
22. The White Mountains, 1837
23. Arrival
24. “Beauty”
25. Concord
26. Miracles
27. “Newborn bard of the Holy Ghost”
28. “The end of all things”
29. Madness

III. God’s Scrivener
30. Prince Hamlet
31. Asylum
32. “In obedience to the Spirit”
33. “Pierced through with many spears”
34. “Insane with God”
35. “Epistles to the Unborn”
36. “Between Very & the Americans”
37. Essays and Poems by Jones Very
38. Madness and Meaning
39. “True relations . . . in a false age”

IV. Man of Peace
40. Nonresistance
41. “Heaven is a state and not a place”
42. War, Slavery, and Intemperance
43. “I war not, nor wrestle with the earthly man”
44. “But still the poet midst the tumult sings”
45. Knowledge and Truth
46. “The presence of things invisible”
47. “The Book of Life”

Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Notes
A Note on Sources
Bibliography
Index

Excerpt

In September of 1838, a few months after Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his Divinity School Address, a twenty- five- year- old tutor and divinity student at Harvard named Jones Very stood before his beginning Greek class and proclaimed himself “the second coming.” By the end of the week he had been relieved of his teaching duties and sent home to Salem, where he spent Saturday and Sunday repeating his claims to astonished and outraged religious leaders, some of whom were angry enough to throw him physically from their houses into the dusty Salem streets. The following Monday, Very entered McLean Hospital— or McLean Asylum for the Insane, as it was then known— where he stayed for a month, reading and writing and spreading his idiosyncratic interpretation of the Gospels to other patients. Over the next twenty months, he would write more than three hundred sonnets, many of them in the voice of a prophet like John the Baptist or of Christ himself— all, he was quick to claim, delivered to him, as though through dictation, by the Holy Spirit. His purpose or mission Very tried to explain to anyone who would listen, and his listeners included the major figures of Unitarianism and the emerging Transcendentalist movement. He was examined by the dean of romantic Unitarianism, William Ellery Channing, and strove to “convert,” among others, Elizabeth and Sophia Peabody, Bronson Alcott , Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Emerson. For a short time Very haunted Salem like one of Hawthorne’s obsessed characters, bright- eyed and feverish, an avatar of an individualism so complete that it erased all individuality. His demands were impossible, his intense faith unnerving and otherworldly. Some thought he had become a kind of walking corpse; others, that he had, in Channing’s words, “obtained self annihilation & become an oracle of God” (EP 408). Probably no one believed that his poems came as directly from God as Very claimed or that the “other consciousness” he had detected inside himself was unquestionably divine. But many were moved by his presence and even more impressed by the quiet, controlled poetry that spilled forth during his season of spiritual ecstasy. 

This brief but strange episode in the larger story of Transcendentalism constitutes the essence of Very’s reputation as a significant, if curiously idiosyncratic, early American poet and a momentary refractor of the developing light of American individualism. But the full story of his life is much more than a footnote to the biographies of Emerson or the Peabody sisters. Born into the same politically riven, rich but recalcitrant Salem that produced Hawthorne, Very overcame repeated tragedies— the loss of two of his siblings and his father’s traumatic death when he was still a boy— as well as a questionable family reputation, to become a star student at Harvard. While there, fi red by the ambition to become an epic poet he pursued a line of personal reading and development that took him, via his own path, toward similar ground as Emerson, whose Nature appeared just a few weeks after Very’s graduation in 1836. In the months leading up to that famous September that saw the birth of the Transcendental Club, Very had begun his own revolutionary process, an attempt to remove all trace or tremor of personal will, to transform himself, anticipating the most famous passage in Nature itself, into “part or particle of God” (LA 10). Over the next two years, this increasingly stringent, internal demand to give up all, to surrender “every thought and aff ection” to God, would lead to his assumption of the role described by Emerson in the Divinity School Address: “a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost” (LA 89). 

Often misread as the story of a Salem eccentric more amusing than important, Very’s life stands instead as a parallel history to Transcendentalism that casts a revealing and critical light on its central claims. For all of Emerson’s dramatic language about the divinity of the true self, the logical implications of such a claim, as Lawrence Buell argued in Literary Transcendentalism, actually “disturbed” many who might otherwise consider such language symbolic.2 Very came to embody both the full radicalism of Emerson’s idealism and the dramatic effects of that disturbance. For some, and likely for Emerson in the end, he was simply an atavism, a pre-Enlightenment “stylite” who failed to address the problems of skepticism and epistemology. But to other eyes, Very’s ecstatic “mission,” his rejection of will and individual desire— his extension of radical individualism to its breaking point— revealed the trap of isolation and emptiness that lay in wait for those who sought complete “transcendence.” Hawthorne’s well-known description of Very, whom he knew and had observed personally, is deeper and more apt than has typically been appreciated. In “The Hall of Fantasy,” a satirical sketch devoted in part to skewering Transcendentalists, Hawthorne placed Very in a corner, so to speak: “In the same part of the hall, Jones Very stood alone, within a circle which no other of mortal race could enter, nor himself escape from.”3 More than just another critique of monomania, this quick, precise portrait strikes at the core of the individualist dilemma: if the inner life is truly all that there is, the only reliable source of meaning or value, then the conclusion of its pursuit can be as much a form of melancholia as of ecstasy. Th e Emersonian “circle” or individual horizon, here subtly alluded to, may be (must be?) a cage of sorts; or, if we are willing to let this metaphor develop forward ten more years, not a cage but a claustrophobic Wall Street offi ce where a once enthusiastic scrivener named Bartleby finds himself similarly “cornered.” 

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