| Author |
Davis, Clark, author.
|
| Title |
God's scrivener : the madness and meaning of Jones Very / Clark Davis. |
| OCLC |
1373011643 |
| ISBN |
9780226828688 (hardcover) |
|
0226828689 (hardcover) |
|
electronic book |
| Publisher |
Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2023. |
|
©2023 |
| Description |
363 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm |
| LC Subject heading/s |
Very, Jones, 1813-1880.
|
|
Poets, American -- 19th century -- Biography.
|
|
Mystics -- Massachusetts -- Biography.
|
|
American literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism.
|
|
Transcendentalism (New England)
|
|
Religion and literature -- United States.
|
Other
Genre heading/s |
Biographies.
|
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages [349]-355) and index. |
| Contents |
Introduction -- Prologue -- I. "There is something very strange in it all". Cousins; Federal Street; Eldest son; Biography (I); Cornelia Africana; Biography (II); A student's notes, 1833-1834; A poet's notes, 1834; Early poems, 1833-1835; The uses of faith, 1835; "Change of heart"; Scrapbook, 1835-1836; Lamartine; Poems, 1835-1836; "the torn flower"; Spiritual freedom -- II. "Flee to the mountains!" "Part or particle of God," 1836; The messianic moment; Mr. Tutor Very; Temptation and peace; "My heart in life's winter"; The White Mountains, 1837; Arrival; "Beauty"; Concord; Miracles; "Newborn bard of the Holy Ghost"; "the end of all things"; Madness -- III. God's scrivener. Prince Hamlet; Asylum; "In obedience to the Spirit"; "Pierced through with many spears"; "Insane with God"; "Epistles to the unborn"; "Between Very & the Americans"; Essays and poems by Jones Very; Madness and meaning; "True relations...in a false age" -- IV. Man of peace. Nonresistance; "Heaven is a state and not a place"; War, slavery, and intemperance; "I war not, nor wrestle with the earthly man"; "But still the poet midst the tumult sings"; Knowledge and truth; "The presence of things invisible"; "The Book of LIfe". |
| Summary |
"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. |
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