Jones Very

• Born: August 28, 1813
• Birthplace: Salem, Massachusetts
• Died: May 8, 1880
• Place of death: Salem, Massachusetts

Other literary forms

Jones Very (VEH-ree) wrote a few critical essays, the best of which were originally collected, along with a selection of his poetry, in Essays and Poems. Such essays as “Epic Poetry,” “Hamlet,” and “Shakespeare” have been particularly rich resources for biographers and literary critics interested in understanding Very’s poetic goals and practices. Also, about 117 sermons survive in manuscript form, the results of his service as a supply minister for nearly four decades.

Achievements

Both during his life and after, Jones Very’s significance as a poet has generally been understood in relationship to the American Transcendentalist movement. Of particular importance to biographers and critics has been Very’s connection toRalph Waldo Emerson, Transcendentalism’s chief spokesperson and writer. Certainly, Emerson’s sponsorship of Very resulted in the only book-length publication of Very’s poems during Very’s lifetime, in 1839, a volume which Emerson edited and for which he made the necessary contacts with a publisher. For a very short period, during the years 1838 and 1839, Very seemed to Emerson and his associates to be the epitome of the American Transcendentalist poet linked to divinity, expressing intuitive insights and truths about the universe in pure and beautiful language.

Later biographers and literary critics have been able to observe that Very’s connection to the Transcendentalists and Emerson was at best a mixed blessing. Although it resulted in early publication of his efforts, it also made it difficult to perceive that Very, at least for a short time, was a unique and powerfully mystical poet in his own right. Interestingly, many of the poems that Emerson chose not to include in his selection of poetry for Very’s first publication are the ones that now seem most central and original. Since the majority of Very’s poems are sonnets, he also has assumed importance as one of the most successful of America’s writers of poetry in the sonnet form.

Biography

Jones Very was born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1813 to a sea captain father and a strong-minded, highly independent, and somewhat atheistic mother. Very sailed with his father for nearly two years, beginning at age nine, but after his father’s untimely death in 1824, Very attended school in Salem for three years, excelling as a scholar, until at age fourteen he left for employment in an auction room. He refused to give up his goal of enrolling at Harvard, however, and continued his self-education through extensive reading, eventually obtaining the help of a special tutor as well as securing employment as an assistant in a Latin school, preparing younger boys for entrance into college. During this time, his earliest, rather imitative poems began appearing in a local newspaper, the Salem Observer.

So advanced was Very in his scholarly ability that he was able to enter Harvard in February, 1834, as a second-term sophomore. His years at Harvard were crucial in Very’s progress as a scholar, poet, and religious thinker. He distinguished himself as a student, eventually graduating second in his class in 1836 with particular expertise in Latin and Greek. He continued to write poetry, including the class songs for his sophomore and senior years, as well as poems imitative of William Wordsworth and William Cullen Bryant.

Most important, however, under the influence of some of his Unitarian teachers and classmates, he began to turn to religion in a serious way for the first time in his life, thus deviating radically from his mother’s skepticism. Particularly in his senior year, he experienced what he called “a change of heart,” becoming convinced “that all we have belongs to God and that we ought to have no will of our own.” During the next two years, while staying on at Harvard as a tutor in Greek and a student at the Divinity School, he gave himself to the struggle of ridding himself of his own will and becoming perfectly conformed to the will of God working within him. His poetry writing more and more partook of this spiritual battle, centering on intense religious feelings and intuitions within the framework of the traditional Shakespearean sonnet form.

Very delivered a lyceum lecture on the subject of epic poetry in Salem in December of 1837. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, a prominent Transcendentalist and reformer, attended this lecture and immediately recognized the uncommon promise of Very as a thinker. Knowing nothing of his poetry writing, she immediately set up a connection between Very and Ralph Waldo Emerson, which resulted in Very’s lecturing at Concord in April of 1838. Very also began attending some of the so-called Transcendental Club meetings during the spring and summer of 1838. Emerson was much taken with Very’s depth of thought and his insights into William Shakespeare and encouraged him to continue his writing about poetry, but Emerson, like Peabody, seems to have been unaware of Very’s own poetic productions during these months.

Very’s spiritual journey reached some sort of a high point in the fall of 1838, when he evidently experienced what he thought was the total replacement of his own will by the will of God. This perhaps mystical experience immediately resulted in his proclaiming to students and friends that the end of the world and Christ’s Second Coming were occurring, as evidenced in Very’s own new relationship with divinity. He claimed that the Holy Spirit was speaking through him, and he urged those who listened to experience this Second Coming through a similar banishing of their own wills. Such statements were upsetting to some students and brought the displeasure of the Harvard authorities. Very was sent home to Salem, where his similar proclamations to ministers and leaders regarding their need of repentance and reformation led to his being removed to the McLean Asylum in Charlestown as one who was perhaps insane.

Although Very was released from the hospital after a month, his newfound spiritual intensity continued to challenge his new Transcendentalist friends and Salem society. It was during this period of heightened spiritual feeling that Very’s poetry began to flow rapidly from his pen, with more than three hundred sonnets produced during just over one year of religious exaltation from September, 1838, to the latter part of 1839. Emerson became aware of Very’s poetry during this time and undertook the job of selecting and editing the poems that were collected in the small volume Essays and Poems.

Interestingly, the publication of the poems seemed to coincide with the decline of Very’s religious intensity and with his return to a more mundane, albeit dedicated, religious life. For the next forty years, he lived in Salem with his siblings, never marrying but serving as a supply minister to Unitarian churches in the New England area, presenting sermons in the absence of the regular ministers. He continued to produce poetry, but not at the rate nor with the intensity and originality of the poems authored in 1838 and 1839. He died in 1880 in relative obscurity.

Analysis

During the course of his long poetic career, Jones Very wrote some 870 separate poems, many of them published in newspapers and magazines of his day, but only 65 appearing in the thin volume edited by Emerson in 1839. It is common for biographers and literary critics to separate the poems written by Very during his period of growing religious excitement in the late 1830’s from the largely imitative poems written before that period and the competent but not strikingly intense poems written in the four decades after that period. It is the poetry of the so-called ecstatic period that most interested and challenged the Transcendentalists and has continued to impress readers in the various generations since. Although repetitious in themes and format, the sonnets from the religiously intense phase of Very’s experience carry a certain power and originality markedly lacking in the poetry written before and after this period.

Poems of spiritual intensity

During the late 1830’s, poems poured from Very’s pen, sometimes, according to Peabody, at the rate of one or two a day. Very, convinced that his will had been totally replaced by the will of divinity, believed that these sonnets were in essence not authored by him but rather were the words of God or the Holy Spirit. Written rapidly, seemingly without revision (how could one revise the words of God?), with little attention to formalities such as spelling and punctuation, the poems of this phase have presented serious editorial issues to editors from Emerson to the present. Yet, the lack of formality and polish helps to bring immediacy to the poems, the best of which seem particularly forceful in their expression of religious passion.

“The New Birth,” a sonnet that seemingly recalls Very’s intense feelings of change as a result of the key mystical experience in the fall of 1838 when he became convinced of the subjugation of his own will, nicely illustrates the power of Very’s poetry during this period. The poem begins with the announcement that “’Tis a new life,” followed by a vivid figure of how “thoughts” no longer “move” as before, “With slow uncertain steps,” but now “In thronging haste” like “the viewless wind” (a traditional biblical image for the Holy Spirit) enter “fast pressing” through “The portals.” Such a change has resulted because human “pride” (the will) has been “laid” in the “dust.” The thoughts demand “utterance strong” (perhaps the writing of poetry as well as the face-to-face confrontation with teachers and friends), imaged as the sound of “Storm-lifted waves swift rushing to the shore” whose “thunders roar” “through the cave-worn rocks.” The poem ends with the speaker in the poem ecstatically announcing as “a child of God” his new freedom, his awakening from “death’s slumbers to eternity.”

Most of the other sonnets written during this period of high religious feeling center on the traditional Christian themes of death, rebirth, the Second Coming, resurrection, and hope, often with figures and allusions highly dependent on biblical sources. Not all of them are successful, often being little more than paraphrases of Scripture.

However, some of them are very striking, perhaps the most interesting to modern readers being those poems in which the poet or the speaker in the poem assumes the voice of God or Christ, poems so stunningly transcendental in their linkage of humanity to divinity that they were not for the most part included by Emerson in the little volume published in 1839, perhaps because he feared the probable attacks of conservative Christians. For example, Christ seems to be the speaker in “I Am the Bread of Life,” while God seems the central voice in “The Message.” Even more complicated is a poem such as “Terror,” which centers on the end of the world. The poem begins with the speaker as a seemingly human witness to end-time events: “Within the streets I hear no voices loud,/ They pass along with low, continuous cry.” Yet by the end of the poem, the speaker has become God, who calls loudly to humans: “Repent! why do ye still uncertain stand,/ The kingdom of my son is nigh at hand!” Although this seemingly audacious commandeering of a divine voice is perfectly understandable, given Very’s belief that his poems during this period were indeed the products of divine authorship, for the uninitiated reader such a mixture of the human and the divine is at minimum attention getting as well as a challenge to ordinary religious thinking.

Earlier and later poems

The largely imitative poems written before the late 1830’s show a poet progressing in competence and often center on themes and didactic approaches typical of the early Romantic movement in England and the United States. Very’s poems about nature, for example, usually focus first on some observable aspect of his surroundings, followed by overt linkage, often somewhat sentimentally, to an appropriate lesson. “ The Wind-Flower” begins with the personification of this early spring blossom as one that “lookest up with meek, confiding eye/ Upon the clouded smile of April’s face” and then praises the “faith” of this frail flower, willing to bloom with the threat of winter still around, as being “More glorious” than that of “Israel’s wisest king” (Solomon). Such innocent “trust” is, the poem suggests, something humans can learn from, as the last line of the poem underscores, “A lesson taught by Him, who loved all human kind.” Other nature poems of the early period which illustrate this tying of the observation of natural phenomena to religious and moral lessons include “The Robin” and “The Columbine.”

Throughout the last four decades of his life, Very continued to write moralizing poems on nature as well as poems centering on the biblical themes characteristic of the sonnets composed during his ecstatic period of the late 1830’s. He also turned to writing poems with links to the social and historical events of his time. Such poems show his poetic competence and his interest in current events but usually do not achieve anything like lasting artistic merit. His abolitionist stance is mirrored in the poem “The Fugitive Slaves,” for example, while his reaction to the Civil War and Reconstruction can be seen in such poems as “Faith in the Time of War” and “National Unity.” Very also penned the lyrics to numerous hymns during this final phase of his poetic career, including such relatively well-known examples as “Father, Thy Wonders Do Not Singly Stand” and “We Go Not on a Pilgrimage.”

Bibliography

Barlett, William Irving. Jones Very: Emerson’s “Brave Saint.” Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1942. This first “modern” biographical and critical study of Very presents a balanced analysis of his life and poetry, and perhaps most important, publishes numerous poems heretofore uncollected, thus bringing to light some of the best poetry of Very written during his ecstatic period.

Clayton, Sarah Turner. The Angelic Sins of Jones Very. New York: Peter Lang, 1999. This full-length study of Very centers on a New Historicist approach to how readers in various decades have received and understood Very’s poetry, from the time of the Transcendentalists to the present age. The book is particularly effective at bringing together an abundance of scholarly and critical responses to Very’s poetry while illuminating how certain lasting qualities of Very’s writing continue to fascinate readers.

Gittleman, Edwin. Jones Very: The Effective Years, 1833-1840. New York: Columbia University Press, 1967. This work presents an exhaustive treatment of Very’s life and writing during the years of his religious awakening. Gittleman approaches Very’s biography from a psychological perspective and asserts that Very’s religious mania had its roots in family relationships.

Very, Jones. Jones Very: Selected Poems. Edited by Nathan Lyons. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1966. Perhaps more important than the poems selected by Lyons are his considerations of Very’s religious stance and his interpretations of key Very poems in the introduction to this work.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Jones Very: The Complete Poems. Edited by Helen R. Deese. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993. Deese has provided an inestimable service for readers interested in Very’s poetry by bringing together all the poems and editing them with an appropriate scholarly approach and apparatus. Of immense value, also, is her introduction to the volume, which covers Very as a person, thinker, and poet, perhaps the most concise and insightful review of the research on Very.