Jones Very was an American mystic sonneteer and transcendentalist.
Background
Jones Very was born on August 28, 1813, in Salem, Massachusetts. He was the eldest of six children of a union of cousins, Jones and Lydia (Very) Very. His earliest American ancestor, the widow Bridget Very, settled in Salem about 1634, and her descendants, several of whom fought in the Revolution, farmed and followed the sea for six generations.
The elder Jones privateered in the War of 1812, was briefly imprisoned in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and returned to be master until his death of the Boston barque Aurelia. On this ship, young Jones accompanied his father in 1823 to Kronstadt, Russia.
Education
In 1824, to New Orleans, Very attended grammar school. After his father's death, the youth continued his education until 1827, when he began work as an errand boy for a Salem auctioneer. Sporadically tutored for four years by a friendly Salem pundit, J. F. Worcester, Very in 1832, became assistant in the Fisk Latin School of Henry Kemble Oliver.
There he fulfilled three semesters of collegiate requirements and earned future tuition expenses. He entered Harvard in February 1834 as a second-term sophomore. His unusual maturity and studious habits brought him few friends, but he was regularly a speaker at college "exhibitions, " won both junior and senior Bowdoin Prizes, and was graduated in 1836 with second honors.
That autumn his undergraduate record netted him an appointment as Greek tutor to the freshmen, enabling him to study simultaneously at the Harvard Divinity School. This marked the beginning of Very's two most important years.
Career
Hitherto mildly Unitarian, he was soon overtaken by a species of religious exaltation. By September 1837, convinced that he must set down allegedly audible pronouncements of the Holy Ghost, he began to compose religious sonnets with remarkable celerity and was even moved to tears when the Rev. Henry Ware questioned the veracity of his visions. All his work, he constantly insisted, was "communicated" to him.
In Salem that December, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody heard him read his Bowdoin Prize essay, "Epic Poetry. " Knowing the Verys well, she helpfully suggested to Emerson that Jones lecture at the Lyceum in Concord. When Very met him in early April 1838 Emerson was enthusiastic, and Jones, inspired, returned to Cambridge to write another essay, this time on Shakespeare, which he sent to Emerson in August.
Among his colleagues, however, Very's spiritual intoxication had brought his sanity in question. Requested to withdraw, he attended his last faculty meeting, September 10, 1838, and a week later entered McLean Asylum, Somerville, remaining until October 17. Having successfully preached his doctrine of "willess existence" to the inmates, Jones devoted the remainder of the autumn to the attempted conversion of Emerson. Among the transcendentalists, he enjoyed some popularity, and men who talked earnestly with him doubted rumors of his insanity.
James Freeman Clarke's pronouncement, "Monomania?. Monosania!, " was bolstered by Emerson's "Profoundly sane!" Very believed in complete, unquestioning submission to the will of God, and seemed the answer to Emerson's recent plea for a "newborn bard of the Holy Ghost. " When Clarke in March and April 1839 published twenty-seven of Very's sonnets in his Western Messenger, the impetus was given to the preparation, under Emerson's aegis, of a book of Very's prose and verse, Essays and Poems.
Published in September 1839, the verses were called by W. H. Channing "an oracle of God"; by William Cullen Bryant, "among the finest in the language"; and Emerson, who planned to send copies to Carlyle and Wordsworth, thought they bore "an unquestionable stamp of grandeur. " Hawthorne, who disliked Very, none the less called him "a poet whose voice is scarcely heard by reason of its depth. " Less notice was given Very's prose essays, "Epic Poetry, " "Hamlet, " and "Shakespeare, " though the latter, partly a result of conversations with his friend Edward Tyrrell Channing, reveals the core of Very's belief. Very returned to Salem to write increasingly mediocre verse.
Lacking a degree in divinity, he was licensed to preach (1843) by the Cambridge Association and held temporary pastorates in Eastport, Maine, and North Beverly, Massachusetts.
Views
Through some of the poems runs a vague undercurrent of human warmth, but their philosophy contains the worst elements of Asiatic quietism. Emerson rightly regarded Very's doctrine as too other-worldly, utterly lacking in the Yankee vigor which would have stiffened and saved it.
The poems are characterized by clarity and simplicity; but color is inordinately subdued, ideas few, and humor absent. They are distinguished only by sincere religious emotion. By April 1840, this fervor had faded sufficiently for Emerson to recognize its underlying philosophic negativity.
Personality
Very was too shy to preach well, and at forty-five had virtually retired. He was tall, slender, and hollow-cheeked. He lived with his sisters, doing occasional genealogical research for the Essex Institute, contributing to newspapers.
He called himself a "failure, " and lived out forty years of anticlimax in his provincial haven, with his mind and hopes directed toward that other world to which he had formerly enjoyed at least a visionary access.