God's Scrivener: The Madness and Meaning of Jones Very

Of all the literati who swam in and out of Ralph Waldo Emerson's orbit, none displays more strikingly Romanticism's fusion of poetry with visionary mysticism than Jones Very (1813 – 1880). Although most of his eight-hundred-odd poems were humdrum lyrics and commemorative pieces, during an eruption of religio-poetic inspiration in his midtwenties, Very turned out scores of remarkable Shakespearean sonnets — always his preferred genre — in which the speaker assumes the voice of God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, the prelapsarian Adam, the paradigmatic saved soul. The best of these rival the best in the mystical canon from Hildegard von Bingen to Henry Vaughan to Blake, Hopkins, Yeats, and Ginsberg. Prior mastery of the sonnet evidently helped transmute afflatus into elegance, as athletes execute remarkably complicated maneuvers unconsciously.Why did Very explode when he did, and in the way he did? How to understand his admixture of new age Transcendentalist hubris and atavistic Reformation pietism? What was he thinking during those four long decades of the aftermath of quiet life in his family home? The answers must be conjectural since only scanty journal, letter, and eyewitness testimony survives. But enough has surfaced since the last biography sixty years ago to justify another stab. Davis comes well prepared for the task, as author of a discerning study of Very's fellow Salemite Nathaniel Hawthorne, another reclusive son of a sea captain who died young and likewise was raised in a close-knit matriarchal clan. God's Scrivener is scrupulously researched and written with engagingly sympathetic devotion to its subject. It will surely stand as the go-to biography of Very for decades to come. On the downside, even a sympathetic reader will tire of its redundant connect-the-dots subjunctives — Very might have thought this, must have thought that — in the service of the unprovable psychobiographical thesis that Very gravitated toward a Quakerish quietism authorized by divine fiat in response to his fiercely protective but fiercely dominant mother. Biographical explanation of Very's period of illumination is bound to remain forever mysterious, and its poetic fruits will remain all the more luminous in consequence.