Jones Very Biography Quotes 6 Report mistakes

Early Life
Jones Very was born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1813, into a family closely tied to the sea. His father was a sea captain, and as a boy Very spent time on voyages that left a lasting impression on his imagination: the movement of wind and tide, the discipline of ships, and the sense of a power greater than oneself. At home his mother encouraged serious reading and moral introspection. The combination of maritime experience and a household steeped in austere reflection shaped the tone of his later poetry, which often sought stillness and surrender before forces larger than the individual will. He grew up alongside his sister Lydia L. A. Very, who would later write and illustrate books herself and help preserve his papers.

Education and Early Promise
Largely self-taught in youth, Very prepared himself for higher study and entered Harvard College in the mid-1830s. He quickly distinguished himself for disciplined scholarship, particularly in Greek and English letters. An essay he wrote on Shakespeare won a significant Harvard prize and brought him early recognition as a critic of unusual seriousness. Classmates and mentors noted both his reticence and his intensity: he spoke little, read deeply, and worked with a rigor that seemed almost devotional. After graduating, he was appointed a tutor in Greek at Harvard, a signal of the faculty's confidence in his learning and character.

Shakespeare and the Idea of Self-Surrender
Very's most striking early prose centered on Shakespeare. In his celebrated essay, he argued that Shakespeare's greatness lay in a radical effacement of personal will, a state in which the poet became a clear channel for a universal mind. To write greatly, Very suggested, the poet must be still, receptive, and obedient to a truth that does not originate in the private self. This language of self-surrender, first expressed in literary criticism, foreshadowed the spiritual convictions that soon took command of his life and art.

Religious Crisis and Prophetic Vocation
In 1838 Very underwent an intense religious experience that he described as the descent of the Holy Spirit. He came to believe that his task was not to invent but to bear witness, and he began to speak with a calm but unyielding certainty about sin, stillness, and the need for inward obedience. The same conviction entered his classrooms; colleagues at Harvard grew concerned, and he left his post. For a short time he was placed under medical care, but he returned quickly to ordinary life, quiet and self-possessed, unchanged in his belief that he had been called to serve as a voice rather than an originator.

Transcendentalist Allies and Publication
Ralph Waldo Emerson recognized the seriousness of Very's mind and the purity of his utterance, even while keeping his own philosophical distance from Very's prophetic claims. Emerson gathered and helped publish Very's Essays and Poems in 1839, presenting him to a wider audience. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, a tireless advocate for New England writers, introduced his work to friends and readers, and encouraged him personally. Margaret Fuller, as an editor and critic associated with the Transcendentalist circle, offered him attention and space in the conversation of the period; some of his poems and prose appeared in The Dial, where their austere beauty and moral directness found sympathetic readers. Around these figures, Very occupied a distinctive place: respected, carefully listened to, yet set apart by the absoluteness of his religious posture.

Poetry of Obedience and Vision
Very wrote mostly sonnets, many of them brief meditations on conscience, nature, and the mastery of the will by a higher law. The poems are spare and lucid, preferring plain diction and a steady iambic line. He wrote of the sea and the wind, of autumn light and evening hush, of the soul's inclination to resist and the peace that follows surrender. He believed the poems were given rather than made; he refused to revise them substantially, regarding himself as an amanuensis for the Spirit. The best of these sonnets balance severity with tenderness, placing him in a small company of American poets who made devotion their central theme. Readers in Emerson's circle admired the work's clarity and restraint, even if the theology behind it remained a point of debate.

Later Years in Salem
After the burst of activity around 1838, 1839, Very withdrew from public life. He returned to Salem, living simply and writing steadily, if less visibly. He occasionally preached in Unitarian pulpits, where his sermons, like his poems, stressed humility, inward quiet, and obedience to the moral law. Friends and admirers visited, among them Emerson, who remained solicitous of his welfare. Lydia L. A. Very preserved his manuscripts and helped sustain his reputation in their hometown. In these years he became a figure of quiet example rather than public controversy: courteous, exact in his habits, and firm in the convictions formed in his youth.

Legacy
Very died in Salem in 1880. His reputation has remained specialized but secure: a singular voice of American religious lyric, and a critic who articulated with unusual rigor the idea of poetic impersonality. Scholars of New England thought regard him as an inward counterpart to the broader, more social Transcendentalism of Emerson and Fuller; his work is smaller in scale but intense in purpose. The volume Emerson helped into print ensured that his sonnets and essays would be available to later generations, and his sister's care for his papers anchored his story in reliable testimony. Today, Jones Very stands as a poet of stillness and consent, a writer for whom form served faith, and for whom literature was an instrument of conscience rather than an arena of display.

Our collection contains 6 quotes who is written by Jones, under the main topics: Wisdom - Meaning of Life - Deep - Mortality - Work.