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God’s Scrivener

God’s Scrivener

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$35.00

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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. Clark Davis is professor of English and literary arts at the University of Denver. He is the author of After the Whale: Melville in the Wake of Moby-Dick, Hawthorne’s Shyness: Ethics, Politics, and the Question of Engagement, and It Starts with Trouble: William Goyen and the Life of Writing. 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

“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”

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Dimensions 1 × 6 × 9 in