In September of 1838, a few months after Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his 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.” By the end of the week he had been relieved of his teaching duties and sent home to Salem, where he spent Saturday and Sunday repeating his claims to astonished and outraged religious leaders, some of whom were angry enough to throw him physically from their houses into the dusty Salem streets. The following Monday, Very entered McLean Hospital— or McLean Asylum for the Insane, as it was then known— where he stayed for a month, reading and writing and spreading his idiosyncratic interpretation of the Gospels to other patients. Over the next twenty months, he would write more than three hundred sonnets, many of them in the voice of a prophet like John the Baptist or of Christ himself— all, he was quick to claim, delivered to him, as though through dictation, by the Holy Spirit. His purpose or mission Very tried to explain to anyone who would listen, and his listeners included the major figures of Unitarianism and the emerging Transcendentalist movement. He was examined by the dean of romantic Unitarianism, William Ellery Channing, and strove to “convert,” among others, Elizabeth and Sophia Peabody, Bronson Alcott , Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Emerson. For a short time Very haunted Salem like one of Hawthorne’s obsessed characters, bright- eyed and feverish, an avatar of an individualism so complete that it erased all individuality. His demands were impossible, his intense faith unnerving and otherworldly. Some thought he had become a kind of walking corpse; others, that he had, in Channing’s words, “obtained self annihilation & become an oracle of God” (EP 408). Probably no one believed that his poems came as directly from God as Very claimed or that the “other consciousness” he had detected inside himself was unquestionably divine. But many were moved by his presence and even more impressed by the quiet, controlled poetry that spilled forth during his season of spiritual ecstasy. 

This brief but strange episode in the larger story of Transcendentalism constitutes the essence of Very’s reputation as a significant, if curiously idiosyncratic, early American poet and a momentary refractor of the developing light of American individualism. But the full story of his life is much more than a footnote to the biographies of Emerson or the Peabody sisters. Born into the same politically riven, rich but recalcitrant Salem that produced Hawthorne, Very overcame repeated tragedies— the loss of two of his siblings and his father’s traumatic death when he was still a boy— as well as a questionable family reputation, to become a star student at Harvard. While there, fi red by the ambition to become an epic poet he pursued a line of personal reading and development that took him, via his own path, toward similar ground as Emerson, whose Nature appeared just a few weeks after Very’s graduation in 1836. In the months leading up to that famous September that saw the birth of the Transcendental Club, Very had begun his own revolutionary process, an attempt to remove all trace or tremor of personal will, to transform himself, anticipating the most famous passage in Nature itself, into “part or particle of God” (LA 10). Over the next two years, this increasingly stringent, internal demand to give up all, to surrender “every thought and aff ection” to God, would lead to his assumption of the role described by Emerson in the Divinity School Address: “a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost” (LA 89). 

Often misread as the story of a Salem eccentric more amusing than important, Very’s life stands instead as a parallel history to Transcendentalism that casts a revealing and critical light on its central claims. For all of Emerson’s dramatic language about the divinity of the true self, the logical implications of such a claim, as Lawrence Buell argued in Literary Transcendentalism, actually “disturbed” many who might otherwise consider such language symbolic.2 Very came to embody both the full radicalism of Emerson’s idealism and the dramatic effects of that disturbance. For some, and likely for Emerson in the end, he was simply an atavism, a pre-Enlightenment “stylite” who failed to address the problems of skepticism and epistemology. But to other eyes, Very’s ecstatic “mission,” his rejection of will and individual desire— his extension of radical individualism to its breaking point— revealed the trap of isolation and emptiness that lay in wait for those who sought complete “transcendence.” Hawthorne’s well-known description of Very, whom he knew and had observed personally, is deeper and more apt than has typically been appreciated. In “The Hall of Fantasy,” a satirical sketch devoted in part to skewering Transcendentalists, Hawthorne placed Very in a corner, so to speak: “In the same part of the hall, Jones Very stood alone, within a circle which no other of mortal race could enter, nor himself escape from.”3 More than just another critique of monomania, this quick, precise portrait strikes at the core of the individualist dilemma: if the inner life is truly all that there is, the only reliable source of meaning or value, then the conclusion of its pursuit can be as much a form of melancholia as of ecstasy. Th e Emersonian “circle” or individual horizon, here subtly alluded to, may be (must be?) a cage of sorts; or, if we are willing to let this metaphor develop forward ten more years, not a cage but a claustrophobic Wall Street offi ce where a once enthusiastic scrivener named Bartleby finds himself similarly “cornered.”