A Voice From the Tomb

One day in the late summer of 1838, the spirit suddenly filled 25-year-old Jones Very, a middling poet, promising scholar, and up-from-poverty Harvard Divinity School student. On September 14, a Friday, he announced during a Divinity School debate that he was doing God’s will, that he was God’s will, and that “he was no longer a man but the Holy Spirit was speaking in him, and that what he said was eternal truth.” He urged his students to “flee to the mountains, for the end of all things is at hand,” and he revealed to a faculty member that Christ’s Second Coming was inside him. A few months later, Very wrote to a friend that he felt possessed of “a new will,” a “will that was not my own … I was moved entirely by the Spirit within me to declare to all that the coming of Christ was at hand.”

Charges of madness hounded Very around Cambridge, and before the next day’s dawn, Harvard’s president himself had dismissed the young teacher—which did nothing to deflate Very’s enthusiasm. Come morning, he was jobless but buoyant, flitting back and forth across his native Salem, Massachusetts, trying to convert the largely aghast local ministers. By Monday, he was admitted to the McLean Asylum for the Insane, where he remained for the next month. He would have been forgotten there had it not been for his insistence that his egoless poetry was proof of his divinity, and that practicing poetry was the mark of godliness. He spent his hospital stay writing a brilliant critical essay on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as well as “The New Birth,” one of the first of more than 300 Shakespearean sonnets Very eventually wrote, all of them feverishly penned and often unrevised:

’Tis a new life—thoughts move not as they did
With slow uncertain steps across my mind,
In thronging haste fast pressing on they bid
The portals open to the viewless wind;
That comes not, save when in the dust is laid
The crown of pride that gilds each mortal brow,
And from before man’s vision melting fade
The heavens and earth—Their walls are falling now—
Fast crowding on each thought claims utterance strong,
Storm-lifted waves swift rushing to the shore
On from the sea they send their shouts along,
Back through the cave-worn rocks their thunders roar,
And I a child of God by Christ made free
Start from death’s slumbers to eternity.

For a moment, the world took note. Very’s hometown newspaper, the Salem Observer, created a new column for his poetry. And the local transcendentalists, whose company he kept, were thrilled by his audacity. Ralph Waldo Emerson edited Very’s Essays and Poems (1839), a book which Henry David Thoreau regarded highly. Very and Bronson Alcott were close, and he was a regular guest of the educator Elizabeth Peabody, who was constantly on the lookout for brilliant young men to add to the transcendentalist gaggle. William Cullen Bryant included six of Very’s ecstatic poems in his anthology Selections from the American Poets (1840), and both Richard Henry Dana Sr. and James Russell Lowell were admirers.

Inspiration is a kind of possession, but the spirit never stays long. God seems to have abandoned Very in 1840, after which his audience, too, vanished. Though he continued to write poetry until his death in May 1880, aside from that ecstatic year and a half, Very has never been anything other than a peculiar footnote in the history of Transcendentalism—remarkable at the time for his apotheosis and his prophetic poetry, but forgotten almost immediately.

Yet despite his seeming historical insignificance, Very is the subject of a meticulously researched, erudite, and patient new biography, God’s Scrivener: The Madness and Meaning of Jones Very (University of Chicago Press, 2023), by literary scholar Clark Davis. Steeped in Transcendentalism and the literary culture of mid-19th-century New England, Davis previously wrote studies of Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, the latter of whom, like Very, hailed from the witchy town of Salem. Part of Davis’s work is to rescue Very not so much from obscurity—the biography alone can’t accomplish that—but from the ill-usage of Edwin Gittleman, Very’s last major biographer, whose 1967 volume relies heavily on psychoanalysis and supposition to explain away the miraculous. Instead, Davis keeps a scholarly eye on the abyss that has swallowed most things past: “One of the challenges of writing about Jones Very,” he argues in what amounts to his credo, “is to recognize the limits of what we can know and to respect those limits as constitutive of the person now available to us.”

Those limits are substantial, not least because most of the Very family papers were burned in 1901 when Lydia Louisa Anna, Very’s sister and the family recordkeeper, died. (It was custom at the time to honor the deceased’s privacy by destroying their personal papers.) But a person is much more than their records; each of us bears the traces of our time, and 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.

For instance, it is often forgotten how truly radical, and troubling for some, the transcendentalists were: they were prison reformers and Christian socialists, abolitionists, liberatory feminists, and backers of revolutionary European democratic independence movements. Thoreau is rightly credited as the root of an American branch of anarchism, and Alcott founded an anarchist commune, Fruitlands, in Massachusetts, approximately 30 miles from the other Transcendentalist commune, Brook Farm. They gave up meat, became tax resisters, and started schools with wild pedagogies. They also helped enslaved people find freedom in Canada, and they rallied around John Brown before he was executed in 1859 for trying to foment a slave uprising in the South. Almost one and all hated the budding culture of capitalism and explored everything from premodern Catholicism to self-reliant individualism as an alternative. Perhaps the only thing that united them is that they believed, to one degree or another, that divinity was alive in the world and alive in humanity, and the proof of both was poetry. Emerson (not a very good poet) wrote that “all that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal event in chronology,” and that poetry is the truth of “spiritual facts,” while Thoreau (a terrible poet) wrote that the poet, “actuated by pure love,” is a divine mystery: “Who can predict his comings and goings?”

It is also often forgotten that Transcendentalism emerged from a religious debate over the nature of miracles. Many of its leading lights were Unitarian ministers—including Emerson, before he left the church—as well as alumni of Harvard, the main supplier of Unitarian clergy. Unitarianism was a gentler offshoot of harsh Calvinism and had, by the second decade of the 19th century, become increasingly academic and scholarly. While the properly trained Unitarian ministers came to resemble what we might now think of as academic literary critics—slicing into biblical texts with an array of sophisticated literary scalpels—the group that would soon convene as the Transcendental Club found all the tweedy lecturing not only overly arid but also belying the living reality of spirit. Emerson put it best in his scandalous “Divinity School Address” (1838): “I once heard a preacher who sorely tempted me to say I would go to church no more,” he began.

A snow-storm was falling around us. The snow-storm was real, the preacher merely spectral, and the eye felt the sad contrast in looking at him, and then out of the window behind him into the beautiful meteor of the snow. He had lived in vain. He had no one word intimating that he had laughed or wept, was married or in love, had been commended, or cheated, or chagrined.

For Emerson, divinity was not to be found in hermeneutics, but in, or rather behind, the snowstorm, behind human laughter, tears, love, and shame. Divinity was the breath in life; it moved the world around us. God was the reality behind every tree, in every person, and what appeared to be solid reality was only a shadow flickering on the wall of a cave. “Nature is the symbol of spirit,” he wrote in Nature (1836), Transcendentalism’s manifesto, and we could read those symbols. All we needed to do was awaken from tradition to the dawn of revelation.

All this was heresy for sober Unitarians, and the backlash against Nature very nearly swamped Emerson’s just-launched career as an essayist. But there were those, like Very and Walt Whitman, who were “simmering, simmering, simmering,” brought “to a boil” by Emerson’s essays. For Very, the most influential part of Emerson’s thinking was his emphasis on the divinity of individual people.

But Very was also his own thinker, and Davis superbly reconstructs the poet’s improbable intellectual history. Very’s parents were first cousins who conceived a child about three months before they were married in February 1813. Very was born that August. When Very was 11, his father died of tuberculosis, and in what Davis convincingly presents as a defining moment of the young poet’s life, Very stood witness as his mother Lydia, and her father-in-law (who was also her uncle), Isaac, raged over the will. Very listened as his mother was accused of stealing money and property, and of living in unmarried sin. When she searched for her marriage certificate, it couldn’t be found—it seems Isaac had stolen it. (Davis is the first biographer to find an announcement of the marriage in the March 5, 1813, edition of the Salem Gazette.) But Lydia wouldn’t back down. She was fierce, and stood up for herself and her four children. She battled Isaac all the way to court, and won—though not much. Her husband had been a seafaring man who left little behind, and, with her wider family turned against her, she raised her children on her own as best she could.

Although he was a diligent, standout student, Very quit school when he was 14 to help pay his family’s bills. He got a job at an auction house, where one day he persuaded the owner to sell him a rare edition of Shakespeare at a deep discount. Though he spent his days working, he continued studying on his own, and eventually found a private tutor who readied young men for Harvard. Very enrolled there when he was 20, four years older than the typical first-year student.

In our current era of literary-theoretical pyrotechnics, it can be easy to overlook the incredible detail that can be panned from the past by old-school, meticulous sifting of the records. God’s Scrivener is an ode to ass-in-chair scholarship. Davis has identified and read the books Very checked out of Harvard’s library: William Wordsworth’s The Excursion (1814); Henry Taylor’s play, Philip van Artevelde (1834), which repudiates individual identity; and Alphonse de Lamartine’s travelogue A Pilgrimage to the Holy Land (1835), which insists that poets are the voice of true spiritual experience. Davis has tracked down surviving letters, scanned the poems, and mined the genealogical history. In one memorable chapter devoted to Lydia Very’s needlework depiction of the painter Angelica Kauffmann’s Cornelia, Mother of the Gracchi, Pointing to Her Children as Her Treasures (1785), he reads deeply into the family’s surviving material history, all in order to approach the living poet as close as possible. The picture that emerges is of a passionate, brilliant, inflexible, and conflicted human being torn by an insatiable trinity: sexual desire, love of the beautiful (especially that expressed in Shakespeare’s sonnets), and a drive for Christian purity.

At the heart of Very’s internal conflict was the question of beauty. There was the carnal kind; with great tact and an unwillingness to let his imagination impose lurid details, Davis demonstrates that Very’s head often turned toward beautiful women. But rather than follow his desire, Very was repulsed by the earthiness of his own body. Desire, will, the individual—for Very, these were synonymous and treacherous, and he spent his early adulthood trying to theorize and practice a Christian way out of earthly temptation. One can feel these tensions, and Very’s not-quite successful attempt to resolve them, in his poem “Beauty,” from September 1837, a year before his messianic epiphany:

I gazed upon thy face—and beating life,
Once stilled its sleepless pulses in my breast,
And every thought whose being was a strife
Each in its silent chamber sank to rest;
I was not, save it were a thought of thee,
The world was but a spot where thou hadst trod,
From every star thy glance seemed fixed on me,
Almost I loved thee better than my God.
And still I gaze—but ’tis a holier thought
Than that in which my spirit lived before,
Each star a purer ray of love has caught,
Earth wears a lovelier robe than then it wore,
And every lamp that burns around thy shrine
Is fed with fire whose fountain is Divine.

Even more than women, Very loved literature. He dove headfirst into his day’s avant-garde Shakespearean literary criticism during his college years, much of which focused on isolating the source of the Bard’s genius—but here again, he encountered the problem of beauty. For if, as many believed, all true beauty derived from God (as opposed to the earthly beauty of the women who caught his eye), then how could the beauty of Shakespeare’s plays and poetry come from a man whose Christian faith was notoriously tepid?

What Very eventually argued was that Shakespeare, like Jesus or Homer, was “essentially a force of nature, an almost prelapsarian consciousness whose individual will was in complete accord with the world around him,” as Davis puts it. “Shakespeare had become [Very’s] model of a kind of unmediated expression, a vision so pure and uncorrupted that it had escaped the limitations of modern consciousness.” To Very’s mind, Shakespeare had no need to profess his religiosity because the spirit of Christ was in him and acted through him, unsullied. His work was itself prayer, which, as Davis writes, was a “blurry” word for Very—not just the calisthenics to hopefully bring about a miracle, but the miracle itself, a fusion of word, action, and God’s own thought.

The way out of the problem of beauty, then, was to recover those original, divine words clothing the dull world of reality in the loveliest robe. For Very, this meant shutting out the world and its temptations so that one’s own inner voice could be heard. And then one had to find a way to silence that voice, too. What was left after all the apophatic renunciation of everything—including the self—was the other, original voice, the voice of the Divine, that voice that was itself the Divine, and then to ink that voice, those words, on the page. For Very, this was poetry—real, inspired poetry, like Shakespeare’s—and it was not a means to an end. Rather than a way of celebrating the divine or calling others to the true faith, it was salvation itself. God was in all of us, and Eden was the poem.

The impish irony in all of this is that Very’s poetry, even at its most inspired, wasn’t all that good. Even his defenders knew it—then as now. Emerson edited, arranged, marketed, and championed Very’s Essays and Poems, for which he also wrote an anonymous review. He said of Very’s poems: “There is no composition, no elaboration, no artifice in the structure of the rhyme, no variety in the imagery; in short, no pretension to literary merit, for this would be departure from his singleness, and followed by loss of insight.” Davis, too, late in God’s Scrivener, admits that “we would hardly consider his poetry remarkable without [the sonnets’] peculiar history, association with Transcendentalism, and flirtation with religious ‘madness’”—and this is where the limits of Davis’s admirable, sober vow to respect the limits of documentary evidence are most felt.

For it is the question of religious madness that attracts interest to Very and around which his own life orbited, as do the more than 300 pages of God’s Scrivener. Davis is brilliant in his relentless, contextual search—he has written Very’s definitive biography—but the miracle of inspiration is interior, inaccessible via the empirical, documentary record, no matter how sharp-eyed the investigator. The soul can’t be seen with a microscope any more than the Second Coming results from a tempestuous childhood, sexual urges, or literature. If Very had been a Dickinson or a Whitman, then perhaps the poetry would have spoken of inspiration enough—but he wasn’t, it isn’t, and it’s hard, reading God’s Scrivener, not to wonder if somehow his few minutes of fame were all a giant mistake. I find myself thinking not that Very was mad or insincere, but deluded.

The fault is not all Davis’s. The academic monograph is a room shut tight against drafts of irrationality. Monographs are not poems or novels, neither creative nonfiction nor lyric essay. But one wishes Davis had allowed himself a short reprieve from his conscientious grounding, had hazarded just a small flight of fancy. What if he told it slant, just for a moment, or, like Thoreau, looked at the facts with the side of his eye?

To his credit, Davis is clear throughout that his ultimate aim is a case study in what he proposes is the fatal contradiction in Transcendentalist thinking: emphasis on the divinity of the individual inevitably leads to intense isolation. This, however, is a familiar conclusion; in 1970, Hannah Arendt argued that Thoreau’s focus on individual conscience was unpolitical and a retreat from society into the lonely self, which has since become the orthodox dismissal of both Thoreau and Transcendentalism writ large. Even in their own time, many transcendentalists were waved off as navel-gazing, gibberish-spewing naïfs. In his parodic short story “The Celestial Railroad” (1843), Hawthorne imagines the type as a “terrible giant” who looks like a “heap of fog and duskiness,” feeding “honest travellers … smoke, mist, moonshine, raw potatoes, and sawdust” to fatten them up before eating them. Besides, Davis’s research never really fits the critique of individualism that he wants to make. However isolated Very may have become, it wasn’t individualism that trapped him—it was unchecked idealism.

If God created the material world with words, many of the transcendentalists believed you could play this sequence in reverse: the world gave us God’s words, and by them, we could realize the kingdom of heaven on Earth. But few transcendentalists—and Davis is very good on this point—took idealism to the extremes that Very did. Even Emerson sounded a note of skepticism in arguing that we could never know those words of God, those ideas, perfectly. We had to rely on ourselves and on nature to puzzle out God’s intention the best we could. But for Very, for whom the goal was self-negation, not self-reliance, the world and everything in it (including ourselves, our lives, and, ironically, our own poetry) stood in the way of complete inspiration.

His poems often ache with the nihilistic wish for the dissolution of everything that is so that it may all be reborn in light, as in “The Spirit,” a poem from late 1838, which seethes with the inversions of despairing life and vivid death:

I would not breathe, when blows thy mighty wind
O’er desolate hill and winter-blasted plain,
But stand in waiting hope if I may find
Each flower recalled to newer life again;
That now unsightly hide themselves from Thee,
Amid the leaves or rustling grasses dry,
With ice-cased rock and snowy-mantled tree
Ashamed lest Thou their nakedness should spy;
But Thou shalt breathe and every rattling bough
Shall gather leaves; each rock with rivers flow;
And they that hide them from thy presence now
In new found robes along thy path shall glow,
And meadows at thy coming fall and rise,
Their green waves sprinkled with a thousand eyes.

There’s little joy in Very’s work, and physically, he seemed to have wasted away during his months as God’s ghostwriter. Alcott wrote of him, “His looks, tones, words, are all sepulchral. He is a voice from the tomb … I think he will decease soon,” and Emerson said that having Very visit was like having “a corpse in the apartment.”

Very died on May 8, 1880, of St. Anthony’s Fire, a bacterial skin infection. His ecstasy may be unfathomable, yet, try as we might, there is no way to avoid the problem of inspiration and the world-weariness it can incite. I’m inclined to think that Very was right, that inspiration is everywhere all the time—but so what? We can’t live on breath alone. Creativity on its own has never been enough, and first-draft writing, even when penned by those with God’s voice in their ears, cheapens if left unrevised. If it’s true that there’s no poetry without spirit, then it’s equally true that only humans can make doggerel sing. When inspiration abandons us, as it always must, only the seams between the word and the world are left—the seams and our work to weave them together.