In the first biography of the largely-forgotten Transcendentalist poet Jones Very to be published in over 50 years, Clark Davis mines quite impressively into the larger cultural and religious contexts of the time, revealing in wonderful narrative detail the heady atmosphere of Harvard’s campus in the years following the publication and divided reception of Emerson’s Nature. That a spirit of rebellion and anti-authoritarianism had been percolating among the New England intelligentsia was signaled by the Dunkin Rebellion of 1834, when a young and inexperienced tutor of Greek (the eponymous Dunkin) instructed a student to translate aloud a long and particularly difficult list of names and then began correcting him as he struggled to do so. “Seeing that the list went on to more than one page and that the corrections would continue,” Davis writes, “the student then refused to recite, defying further orders with the phrase, ‘I do not recognize your authority’.” Following the student’s refusal to apologize and subsequent withdrawal, “the freshmen and other undergraduates engaged in a variety of destructive protests… But it was the sophomore class that was punished en masse when, after demanding the Greek requirement be lifted, they collectively disrupted morning prayers by loudly shuffling their feet” (51–52). An older member of the sophomore class (Thoreau was a freshman), Very protested that he had not taken any part in the rebellion but was suspended for the remainder of the year along with the rest – an incident to which we would perhaps pay little mind had not Very 4 years later claimed from the pulpit of his Greek class, and then to other faculty members, that he spoke with the infallible authority of God, prompting his immediate dismissal. Yet as Davis’s commendably meticulous biography reveals, the Dunkin Rebellion is just one data point among perhaps a few dozen others that might help us gain a greater understanding of the conditions and circumstances in which sensitive individuals like Jones Very are led into ecstatic states or moods: “What had happened? How did the Divinity School student and Greek tutor, the poet who had once wished to ‘restore epic poetry,’ come to believe, at least for the moment, that he was infallible, ‘a man of heaven’”? (177).

One of the main possibilities that Davis considers is to some extent a psychoanalytic truism: Very’s proclamation of himself as a messianic renunciate could very well have had something to do with his sublimated or repressed feelings towards his mother. “There was no more willful or powerfully determined presence in young Jones’s life than his mother,” Davis claims, though he is just as quick to suggest that we cannot know for certain what Very’s true feelings were with a flurry of questions upon which he seems to believe it would be irresponsible to speculate. “Did [Very], as some biographers have conjectured, object in some respect to Lydia’s defiant personality and possible freethinking?” he asks, “Was he ashamed of her resistance to common pieties and practices? Did he know – and perhaps blame her for it – that his own conception had been premature or that some in the family may have considered his parents’ marriage questionable?” (18). Fair questions, all, but left unpursued in the service of the larger, and perhaps safer, claim that the figure of the mother in Very’s spiritual and poetic consciousness is central, but unknowable: “Very’s relationship with his mother – as well as Lydia’s complicated personality, intelligence, and changing ideas and beliefs – remains the enduring mystery of his life” (310).

Notwithstanding this, there can be no doubt that the role played by Ralph Waldo Emerson must feature prominently in any account of Jones Very’s pronouncement of himself as a “newborn bard of the Holy Ghost,” and Davis handles the question of Emerson’s influence on Very with critical aplomb and acumen, conjuring up the intrepid upstart Emerson in the span of time following the publication of Nature and the “Divinity School Address” – a strident but at this time largely unproven figure who not only delighted in Jones Very’s uncompromising eccentricities and tendency to make others uncomfortable but who also walked a fine line between encouragement and incitement in his dealings with impressionable acolytes. In the “Divinity School Address,” Davis writes, Emerson “had stirred the passions of many, both for and against his messianic individualism. Roused himself by the energy and unconventional behavior of such younger men and new acquaintances as Very and Henry Thoreau, he had excited an atmosphere of high emotion and passionate commitment that would remain charged for months to come” (170). Here, and throughout this rich and finely woven narrative, Davis’s deep knowledge of the cultural and historical contexts of the era along with his use of Very’s commonplace books and sermons in addition to his known letters and poems offers readers a more complete portrait of Jones Very’s world than has been hitherto known and even begins to gesture towards a reevaluation of his position in the American literary canon. In a counter to earlier biographer Edwin Gittleman’s claim that “Very’s effective life was over by the end of 1840” (Jones Very: The Effective Years, Columbia UP, 1967, 372), for example, Davis points out that Very’s later “social, cultural, and political commentary combined with what we now call versified editorials suggests that Very’s full body of work is less aptly connected to the tradition of the religious lyric than to the demotic spirituality and theatrical messianism of a poet like Whitman” (290). Intriguing and compelling claims like this abound throughout God’s Scrivener, demonstrating the breadth of Davis’s knowledge of the complex religious and cultural milieu of New England in the nineteenth century, and inviting further consideration and study of Very’s poetry and sermons, as well as of his place in the American tradition of ascetic poets and scriveners from Edward Taylor to Emily Dickinson.