American sonnets commissioned by the Holy Ghost
GOD’S SCRIVENER The madness and meaning of Jones Very
CLARK DAVIS 312pp. University of Chicago Press. £30 (US $35).
THE AMERICAN POET Jones Very (1813–80), subject of Clark Davis’s thorough and engaging God’s Scrivener, is generally remembered as a curious secondary figure in the Transcendentalist movement. As a recent Harvard graduate he was present at meetings of the Transcendental Club with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Emerson, Very’s inspiration and frequently bemused protector, edited Essays and Poems (1839), the only book of Very’s work published in his lifetime. The novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne satirized him; William Ellery Channing, architect of modern Unitarianism, met with him; the journalist and feminist thinker Margaret Fuller reviewed him; the writer and educational reformer Elizabeth Peabody fretted over him.
There was reason to fret. In September 1838, when Very was a well-liked twenty-five-year-old tutor in Greek at the Harvard Divinity School, he “began acting strangely in the classroom”. In one student’s memory he declared to his assembled class of freshmen that “he was infallible: he was a man of heaven, and superior to all men around him”. Very himself described his mental state at the time, in Davis’s telling, as the achievement of “kenosis, the total emptying-out of the self” in favour of the will of God. Very believed, and preached to anyone who would listen, that he had become a pure vessel for divine prompting and that everything he did, down to leaning on a fireplace mantle, he did at the direction of that prompting, with no interference from a personal self. His friends and family were less sure that God was speaking through him and confined him for a month to the McLean Asylum for the Insane in Somerville, Massachusetts. After returning home he entered long periods of seclusion before living out his life as a supply minister for the Unitarian Church.
The religious mania of a promising young man might have remained only his family’s concern had it not been for the fact that the Holy Ghost had a specific job in mind for Very: the writing of sonnets. Between 1837 and 1839 Very, who had written poetry throughout his college years, wrote hundreds of them. Taken together they detail his philosophical commitment to total self-effacement, at times ventriloquizing the voice of Jesus himself (“with my stripes your deep-eyed sins are healed”). However unusual their genesis, the poems themselves, as Davis writes, “are lucid and often notably serene.” They are also a bit of a slog. Very is no Chistopher Smart, astonishing us with divinely touched visions of the mundane. Instead he instructs the reader, at length and repeatedly, in pious thought. Of “Night” he concludes that “while within her darkened couch I sleep, / Thine e
