God's Scrivener: The Madness and Meaning of Jones Very

A biography of a long-forgotten but vital American Transcendentalist poet. In September of 1838, a few months...
$118.93 AUD
$118.93 AUD
SKU: 9780226828688
Product Type: Books
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Author: Clark Davis
Format: Hardcover
Language: English
Subtotal: $118.93
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God's Scrivener: The Madness and Meaning of Jones Very by Davis, Clark

God's Scrivener: The Madness and Meaning of Jones Very

$118.93

God's Scrivener: The Madness and Meaning of Jones Very

$118.93
Author: Clark Davis
Format: Hardcover
Language: English
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.

Author: Clark Davis
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 12/01/2023
Pages: 312
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.39lbs
Size: 9.24h x 6.33w x 0.86d
ISBN: 9780226828688

About the Author
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.

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