The modern reassessment of Jones Very as an author of literary importance can be dated to a 1936 essay by Yvor Winters who wrote of the poet, “In the past two decades two major American writers have been rediscovered and established securely in their rightful places in literary history. I refer to Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville. I am proposing the establishment of a third.” Winters, in speaking of Very's relations with Emerson and his circle, concluded, “The attitude of the Transcendentalists toward Very is instructive and amusing, and it proves beyond cavil how remote he was from them. In respect to the doctrine of the submission of the will, he agreed with them in principle; but whereas they recommended the surrender, he practised it, and they regarded him with amazement.” Subsequently, William Irving Bartlett, in 1942, outlined the basic biographical facts of Very's life in "Jones Very, Emerson’s “Brave Saint.”" A complete scholarly edition of Very's poetic works belatedly appeared, over a century after the poet's death, in 1993.