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. "In September 1838, a twenty-five-year-old tutor at Harvard named Jones Very stood before his beginning Greek class and proclaimed himself the Second Coming. Relieved of his teaching duties, Very spent the next two years writing more than four hundred sonnets, all of which he claimed were delivered to him, as though through dictation, by the Holy Spirit. He was examined by the dean of romantic Unitarianism, William Ellery Channing, and strove to "convert" Nathaniel Hawthorne and several luminaries of the Transcendentalist movement, including Ralph Waldo Emerson. Many were moved by Very's obsessed presence and by the quiet, controlled poetry that spilled forth during his season of spiritual ecstasy. God's Scrivener: The Madness and Meaning of Jones Very is a comprehensive literary biography of this mystic poet of Transcendentalism, the first fully researched reconsideration of an unusual but important figure in American literature in over fifty years. Born into the same recalcitrant Salem that produced Hawthorne, Very overcame repeated tragedies and a questionable family reputation to become a star student at Harvard. But after he graduated, he pursued a revolutionary regimen to give up all trace of personal will and transform himself, anticipating the most famous passage in Emerson's Nature, into "part or particle of God." Clark Davis's masterful biography shows how Very came to embody both the full radicalism of Emerson's vision, exposing the trap of isolation, and the emptiness that lay in wait for those who sought complete transcendence"-- Provided by publisher