I decided to go back and look for Christian religious themes in Cummings’ poetry and came across this wonderful website entitled " Art & Theology. The author of this blog describe’s its mission this way:
The mission of Art & Theology is to help the church rediscover its rich heritage in the visual, literary, and musical arts and to open it up to the activity of contemporary artists, whose giftings can enable us to see God in new and different ways. Art can enhance our spiritual perception, enrich our prayer lives, stimulate renewed engagement with the Bible, make us more empathetic, challenge our beliefs in a healthy way, and bring us into more intimate contact with the world. Art testifies; it questions; it holds accountable; it stirs and reveals.
Art also slows us down: It invites us to gaze. Deeply. In doing so it fosters the habit of contemplation.
I’m glad to see more Christians discovering the spiritual relevance of his poetry. Cummings’ father had been a paster in the Unitarian church
Birth is a major theme in this poem. “i who have died am alive again,” writes Cummings as himself. He experiences a spiritual awakening, “the birth / day of life and of love and wings.” To me, this line is the most evocative one in the poem. I read into it my own experience of awakening—that is, my conversion to Christianity, my being raised with Christ into new life. This isn’t the same kind of awakening that Cummings is talking about, who, being Unitarian, rejected the divinity of Christ and the literalness of the Resurrection.5 His born-again experience seems to refer more generally to a sudden, sweeping awareness of the glory of God, a wonder that lifts him up out of either ignorance or depression, as if on wings.
There is a nice discussion of one of Cummings’ more famous poems “i thank You God for most this amazing” here. But there are many other relevant poems some of which lament how so many fall away from a regard for what is greater, without which it is so hard to make sense of what we are as people. For example this one “of Ever-Ever Land I speak” where the theme is most obvious in what I bolded:
(of Ever-Ever Land i speak
sweet morons gather roun’
who does not dare to stand or sit
may take it lying down)
down with the human soul
and anything else uncanned
for everyone carries canopeners
in Ever-Ever Land
(for Ever-Ever Land is a place
that’s as simple as simple can be
and was built that way on purpose
by simple people like we)
down with hell and heaven
and all the religious fuss
infinity pleased our parents
one inch looks good to us
(and Ever-Ever Land is a place
that’s measured and safe and known
where it’s lucky to be unlucky
and the hitler lies down with the cohn)
down above all with love
and everything perverse
or which makes some feel more better
when all ought to feel less worse
(but only sameness is normal
in Ever-Ever Land
for a bad cigar is a woman
but a gland is only a gland)
In my opinion he was of the opinion that conformity was a greater enemy of spiritual awakening than rampant individualism. When we finally know each other on the other side, it should be in our whole uniqueness. Otherwise we subtract from the depth and breadth of God.
