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Clark DavisProfessor of English,
University of Denver |
Jones Very’s Sonnet Manuscripts:
Prayer and the Embodiment of Form
Prayer and the Embodiment of Form
I am currently writing a literary biography (the first in over fifty years) of the American poet Jones Very, who, between 1837 and 1840, wrote over 400 sonnets under the influence of the conviction that he had eliminated his individual will and become a conduit for the Holy Spirit. This presentation will focus on a single Very manuscript that raises compelling questions about his choice of poetic form, the materiality of that form in relation to its private circulation, and notions of embodiment found in Very’s idiosyncratic definition of prayer.
During the height of Very’s spiritual enthusiasm, he often carried with him a single sheet of manuscript paper, approximately sixteen by fourteen inches, that contained small copies of thirty-two sonnets (sixteen on each side), the whole sheet being folded into equal squares with a sonnet on each square. According to witnesses, during his attempts to convince others of his mission, he would produce this sheet, apparently to read the sonnets as evidence of the Holy Spirit speaking directly through him. In his “An Epistle on Prayer” (a formal letter sent to Emerson around the same time) Very states that “prayer” is produced by the denial of the self so that one can become the “true body” of Christ. This embodied conception of prayer may have influenced his choice of the sonnet and his attitude toward his own manuscripts. If the truly “born” individual has transformed his (erased) self into Christ’s body, then the words he utters are not merely the communications of the spirit but the tangible enactment of the messianic body (a kind of reincarnation). The formal structure of the sonnet, which might typically seem an odd choice for almost mystic verse, may have provided an embodied structure that, combined with the materiality of the “giant sheet” of manuscript, incarnated Very’s conception of “prayer.”
During the height of Very’s spiritual enthusiasm, he often carried with him a single sheet of manuscript paper, approximately sixteen by fourteen inches, that contained small copies of thirty-two sonnets (sixteen on each side), the whole sheet being folded into equal squares with a sonnet on each square. According to witnesses, during his attempts to convince others of his mission, he would produce this sheet, apparently to read the sonnets as evidence of the Holy Spirit speaking directly through him. In his “An Epistle on Prayer” (a formal letter sent to Emerson around the same time) Very states that “prayer” is produced by the denial of the self so that one can become the “true body” of Christ. This embodied conception of prayer may have influenced his choice of the sonnet and his attitude toward his own manuscripts. If the truly “born” individual has transformed his (erased) self into Christ’s body, then the words he utters are not merely the communications of the spirit but the tangible enactment of the messianic body (a kind of reincarnation). The formal structure of the sonnet, which might typically seem an odd choice for almost mystic verse, may have provided an embodied structure that, combined with the materiality of the “giant sheet” of manuscript, incarnated Very’s conception of “prayer.”
Clark Davis is Professor of English in the Department of English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver. He is the author of monographs on Hawthorne, Melville, and William Goyen and is currently writing a biography of the American poet, Jones Very.